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THE NEW VISION 


IN THE 


GERMAN ARTS 








THE NEW VISION 


IN THE 


GERMAN ARTS 


BY 


HERMAN GEORGE SCHEFFAUER 





NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. MCMXxXIV 





{fe SSE S, 


PRINTED IN 







































ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


Some of the papers in this volume 
originally appeared in The Freeman, 
The Forum, The Dial, The Double- 
Dealer, Shadowland, etc. 


H. G. S. 


FOREWORD 


STRANGE things result when revolutions are un- 
dertaken by a nation of ideologists. It was for 
this reason inevitable that the phenomena that at- 


tended the dynastic, political, social and economic 


revolution in Germany should be accompanied by 
an intellectual and, deriving from this, an es- 
thetic revolution. A backward glance along his- 
torical perspectives will make clear this pecul- 
iar predilection of the Teutonic spirit for change 
that promises improvement—or sometimes only 
change. 

A recrudescence of the same _ tremendous, 
world-changing forces which brought about the 
Reformation in Germany, then the disintegration 
or permeation of older philosophies by modern 
German thinkers, the new world-gospel of Social- 
ism, the challenge of Nietzsche and the social- 
economic reconciliation between monarchism, 
great proletarian masses, capitalism and an age 
of machines, as embodied in Germany’s labor 
legislation, became operative the very moment 


when the German mind, released from the ma- 
vii 


Vill FOREWORD 


terial-military struggle, saw the light of an idea 


or an ideal, even an amorphous one, emerging out ~ 


of the dusky insanity of the war. 

Then it was that the German spirit, in a new 
mysticism that was only a resurging of the old, 
went rapt and metaphysically to work in the at- 
tempt to find new forms for a new civilization. 
The younger intellectuals, especially those of a 
radical hue, seemed haunted by the hypnotic 
phrases of the foreign propagandists who had 
promised a New Dispensation to Humanity, and 
had even promised it by the peculiar agency of a 
war. While disdaining the idea of saving a civil- 
ization which had just been so dreadfully engaged 
in proving its worthlessness, they burned to re- 
construct a new civilization out of the old. The 
poet, painter, architect, playwright and play- 
producer sought new forms and strove diligently 
to demolish the old. The old forms and vessels 
were filled only scantily with the residue of 
precious essences, but prolifically with poisons and 
dross—and the vessels must be broken, or re- 
modeled or refilled. | 

Thus ensued a wild, passionate groping for 
these new forms—to be flooded with the new 
spirit and to be given an authentic life and voice. 
Much ecstatic violence was apparent in the proph- 


FOREWORD ix 


ets of the new movement. Solvents and explo- 
sives became necessary, for the old forms were 
stubborn, petrified, deep-rooted. Much that was 
extravagant, bizarre, and even monstrous was 
born of these convulsions. ‘Then out of the chaos 
there came a kind of chemical metabolism of 
forces and values, and the creed, or the emotion, 
or even the instinct of Expressionism was born. 
The term means little and may be applied to 
the work of some of the ancient as well as to some 
of the later classics, as it is applied to the most 
abstract and extreme modern anarchists of art. 
But it is a term which gathers within its wide cat- 
egorical arms all the new impulses, discoveries 
and experiments in art which have originated or 
been developed in Germany of late years. It 
would, however, be a fallacy to affirm or assume 
that these new forms and values were merely the 
fruit of the upheaval which has taken place in 
Central Europe. In many instances they are but 
the extension or application of movements or cults 
already under way before the war—Cubism, Fu- 
turism, and the like. The Germans, goaded, per- 
haps inspired, by the false dawnlight of the Rev- 
olution, and the black peace, sought to bring 
about, in accordance with their national genius, 
a system and a synthesis of these new elements, 


x FOREWORD 


It is in this sign and in this light that the ex- 
periments—the tentative as well as the successful 
—which are described in the pages of this book, 
must be appraised—in so far as they deal with the 
New Movements and the New Period. To deny 
their significance and vitality, or to imagine that 
they can be put aside with a gesture or annulled 
with phrases still surviving from the vocabulary 
of the war, is to be blind to manifestations which 
have begun to invade the whole structure of art, 
deaf to a new music and inaccessible to a new 
force which is already operating as a powerful 
leaven in the dough of the bread of art which we 
and our children shall eat. 

This book does not pretend to cover the whole 
field of these new esthetic phenomena, nor to es- 
tablish their relations to similar or related phe- 
nomena elsewhere. A few of the essays in this 
collection, such as ““A Candidate for Immortal- 
ity,’ “The Laughing Synthesis,” and “The Or- 
ganization of the Spirit,” have indeed, no direct 
bearing upon the revolt in art. Yet they are akin 
to it in spirit and in effect. For we must not for- 
get that the New, whenever, wherever or by 
whomever discovered or revealed, always comes 
clad with that strange and at first alienating 
power which invests all things and thoughts that 







j out of the Existing, yet challenge or super- 


Ras 431.8 ° 
T within them. 


HERMAN GEORGE SCHEFFAUER 


\ 


a PR re 








La ade peters 


CONTENTS 


Tue EssENcE OF EXPRESSIONISM, 1 

THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE, 42 

A CANDIDATE FoR IMMmoRTALITY, 60 

THe MAcHINE AS SLAVE AND MASTER, 90 
THe “ABSOLUTE” PorEM, 104 

A Pan AGAINST THE AGE, 114 

Tue ARCHITECTURE OF ASPIRATION, 124 
Tue VisinLtE SYMPHONY, 138 

Figures oF War AND Forces oF DEATH, 152 
Tue LaucHinc SYNTHESIS, 160 
ActTivistic ARCHITECTURE, 174 

Tue Dynamic Dramatist, 188 

Tue INTENSIVE SHAKESPEARE, 208 


5] 


Tue CHromatic “OTHELLO,” 217 
Tue Drama on Fire, 228 
“THE MacHINE-STORMERS,” 244 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT, 254 





THE NEW VISION IN 
THE GERMAN ARTS 


| I 
THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 


THe art movement known as Expressionism, a 
term derived from its German form Expressionis- 
mus, eludes all close and compact definition. Its 
kernel and its contours are still unfixed, its sur- 
faces are dimmed with the breath of debate or 
with the frost of negation. Even in Germany, 
the very country in which it took its rise and 
where it was built into a system, a method, a cult 
and even a Weltanschauung, there is, despite 
the German gift for categories, no accepted defi- 
nition. Its relationship to Italian futurism, to 
cubism and other movements is now clear, now 
murkily mystic. Yet it has become a force to 
be reckoned with in every art and in every land. 
It has spiritualized and given new life and im- 


petus to the art-revolutionary groups in Russia, 
I 


2 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


in Scandinavia, in France. It has passed across 
the ocean and into the brains and fingers of the 
younger or youngest generation of American 
creators, 

When the foremost Expressionist painters, 
sculptors and architects are asked to define the 
term, none of them finds a ready answer. Each 
falters and gropes darkly for words. Each seeks 
to imprison a meaning in terms which he can 
not translate from something that is clear and 
strong within his own soul or esthetic conscious- 
ness, if nowhere else. Each struggles with the 
elusiveness of giving this inner concept some con- 
crete form or the garment of an idea. The cre- 
ative artist, however sure he may be of the force 
that inspires and impels him, flounders and 
founders in the glimmering slough of the instinc- 
tive and the undefinable. Sometimes he even 
makes a virtue of necessity, or ignorance, or im- 
potence. That which he cannot intellectually 


postulate, he strives to present as something mys- — 


tically incommensurable. This element is not 
unwelcome, is not without its distinct value to 
the creative artist, but on the part of the art 


critic from whom we demand intellect, psychol- — 
ogy and analysis, it signifies a mortal capitulation. — 
The definitions and elucidations published in — 


eam 





THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 3 


books are almost as obscure and full of groping- 
in-the-shadow. ‘Treatises by Hermann Bahr, by 
Max Peri, by Wilhelm Hausenstein, by Franz 
Landsberger, by Georg Marzynski, by Rudolf 
Blimner and others give ingenious summaries, 
brilliant contra-positions between Expressionis- 
mus and Impressiontsmus, or invest the subject 
with a veil or a scaffolding of ideology or para- 
doxical abstraction. ‘The most common and ob- 
vious refuge is to set up and dilate upon the an- 
tithesis between Expressionism and Impression- 
ism, but many intellectual and logical pitfalls 
lower in this—there is a point where the dif- 
ferences melt, and opposite poles and extremes 
become neutralized and take on the same face. 

Instinct alone, I am convinced, can lead one 
aright and intuition and instinct postulate this 
judgment: the essence of Expressionism lies in 
something indefinable because it is rooted in the 
instinctive, the intuitional, the esoteric. Like 
poetry it can be felt but not defined. He who 
is attuned or adjusted to it knows what is Ex- 
pressionism, but not what Expressionism is. 
Nevertheless, even though there be no precise 
academic or scientific formula there are charts 
and guideposts and signal fires into these new 
lands and seas. 


4 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


The driving force of this new movement or this 
divergence, is something immanent—indwelling 
in the emotions, the soul, the vision, the imagi- 
nation. It is an impulse, a yearning, an aspira- 
tion which has acquired a certain indefinite, 
graphic speech or mannerism—the medium in 
which it sought to render its feelings intelligible 
to the spirit, the eye—or ear. It is the art of a 
new visualization of the outward world, trans- 
muted, transmogrified by the inner-perception 
sublimated by apperception. But between the 
medium of presentation and the medium of re- 
ception and apprehension there lies a great gap— 
and the limitation of the human senses can 
not bridge this gap. Thus, however clear in an 
absolute sense the thought or the emotion of Ex- 
pressionism may be, its media and machinery 
are still imperfect, still hampered by the lack of 
a suitable universal organ to comprehend their 
content. The Unutterable, the Unattainable, 
the Inachievable would take on flesh and form, 
but the Spirit not only overflows, but bursts the 
form. 

Expressionism in its highest and widest form 
is therefore only a convention for the Inexpres- 
sible. Even its drawn, painted and hewn sym- 
bols are but substitutes for the ultimate ideal of 











THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 5 


the supreme Expressionist—the conveyance of a 
thought or an emotion from man to man directly 
and without intermediary agencies or media of 
forms, lines, sounds or language. 

We moderns who have become accustomed to 
half a century of impressionistic painting, we who 
have been taught to see the world with the impres- 
sionistic eye, can no longer conceive of impression- 
ism as anything unnatural. Yet in its day this 
school with its characteristic analysis of light, 
color and atmosphere, its theory of reflexes and of 
painting the world as one saw it, was almost as 
chaotically, anarchistically revolutionary as the 
expressionistic irruption and revolt of to-day. 

The Expressionist commonly defines his art 
as one that acts upon the external world from 
within—from the soul, mind or spirit outwardly. 
The Impressionist is one upon whose soul or fac- 
ulties the External World acts and whose spirit 
or faculties thereupon react and reproduce this 
impression, through the vehicle of a gift, char- 
acter or—to use a dangerous phrase which has 
wrought much havoc in the esthetics of our time 
—through a temperament. Both the Expression- 
ist and the Impressionist give forth—that is, ex- 
press. The chief difference between them lies in 
the source of the raw product or material and the 


6 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


creation of the finished product. The Impres- 
_sionist, having freed himself from the supersti- 
tion of mass vision (such as a sheet of paper being 
always white), paints a man or a tree and seeks 
to array the colors, masses and contours of this ap- 
parition as it impinges upon the retina of his eye, 
even though, like the Pointillist, he must break 
up and atomize every ray into its primary color. 
The Expressionist, limning by inner light, shuts 
out the visible world and projects his idea, his 
feeling or his memory of the visible apparition 
seen transmuted and sublimated. Thus it is not 
the blue sky, the green grass which he seeks to 
paint, but his relation, his reaction, his feel- 
ing toward these—the quality of blueness or 
greenness, the essence or nature of the sky, the 
spirit or significance of the grass. The coarsely 
objective is refined and spiritualized into the 
varified, the subjeétive, the noun into an adjec- 
tive, the thing into its extract—its real self—its 
“soul.” 

All this drags the Expressionist towards the 
abstract, toward the deliberate avoidance of those 
familiar hieroglyphs of drawing or language, 
with which men have conspired or agreed to rep- 
resent nature or natural sounds. Without these, 





THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 7 


to be sure, he is at once lost in the Great Inane, 
but the very instant he employs them, they fet- 
ter him to something that suggests this or that in 
the visible world of realities, or ideas reflected by 
that world. Hence the cry for “substanceless 
art’ is bound to remain unsatisfied, since every 
color, line or form is inextricably, like sounds 
and smells, associated with a definite impres- 
sion, 

The true Expressionist, such as Kandinsky, 
does not, however, attempt to paint abstract 
forms per se. He seeks to impress upon the con- 
tent of his work of art not these forms in them- 
selves but abstractions of these forms. The will 
of the Expressionist is the will to a new for- 
mation. Dismemberment of nature is the first 
phase in the fury of a new creation—the organic 
is shown petrified into formal or geometric fig- 
ures—the abstraction of geometry and of math- 
ematics at once exercises its spell upon the imag- 
ination of the Expressionist. In addition we find 
the Expressionist seized not only by a fury for 
disintegrating and dismembering the old or nat- 
ural forms, but with a lust for action which lashes 
him on to create—an almost spasmodic action— 
the art of the “Aktivist.” This Aktivismus with 





8 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


its official organ Die Aktion, is a section of Ger- 
man Expressionism—one that is colored by 
fiercely radical doctrines in politics. 

Pent in the maya of association, the Expres- 
sionist, throwing or irradiating forth his thought, 
feeling or aspiration, is dependent, if he would 
be “understood,” upon the very impression which 
his esthetic missile makes upon him who is ex- 
posed to it. The prophets of Expressionism, 
such as Herwarth Walden and Rudolf Blimner, 
are therefore quite logical in demanding for the 
full and fuller comprehension of Expressionism, 
the cultivation, or the natural gift of an esthetic 
visual quality—‘“‘kunstlerisches Sehen.” 

“The layman, that is to say, the man inex- 
perienced in visualizing fictional means of ex- 
pression,’ writes Blimner in his “‘Geést des Ku- 
bismus und die Kinste,’ “has an indefinite im- 
pression, difficult to describe, of a tangle of diver- 
sified lines, forms and colors, disordered, even for- 
tuitous. Or is there really an intention in all 
this? But in the very feeling of the possibility 
of an intentional disorder, we already find the 
germ of recognition of a will that orders and reg- 
ulates. It is only the goal, the purpose which 
the layman does not recognize. Finally he be- 
gins to ‘distinguish’ forms in these pictured pre- 








THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 9 


sentments which seem to be mere tangles to him, 
‘things’ familiar to him, or he begins to identify 
their images, houses, trees, human or animal bod- 
ies, limbs or parts of such ‘things’ or forms with 
which he associates these or similiar objects. He 
declares the whole to be ‘incomprehensible’ be- 
cause the picture generates no thoughts and no 
feelings in him. He suspects something mystic 
or symbolical, some secret language of messieurs 
the Cubists!' He demands a key to the riddle— 
a key from without. But no one seems to pos- 
sess such a key. Yet there are persons who are 
sensible of more—these pictures for some reason 
or other charm them to a longer contemplation. 
And in nearly all cases this contemplation leads 
to a recognition of that which induced the charm: 
the realization that the disorder in the picture is 
only an apparent disorder. In reality there és 
order. But by what standards is this order to be 
measured? And what, after all, is order?” 
“Art is production, not reproduction,” cries 
Herwarth Walden, the leader of the well-known 
“Sturm” movement in Germany—‘‘Kunst ¢st 
Gabe, nicht Wiedergabe.’’ But this epigram, like 
so many that show a close affinity to the pun or 
_ play on words and slide with fatal facility from 
tongue or pen, contains only a half truth. It is 


pete Oe es Oa OS eee ae 


10 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


directed here against the object and the artist 
_ subject to the object, against nature, against the 
sophisticated or conventional seizure or repre- 
sentation of nature. Nature, once the goddess 
and guide of the creative artist, the model, source 
and touchstone of all excellence, is regarded by 
the radical Expressionists as the evil, seductive 
element, the temptress unto imitativeness, the 
bondage to the material, the sheer and easy de- 
scent toward all traditional and conventionalized 
Trash. It is nature, they declare, which prevents 
an art creation from being or becoming art. The 
artist who accepts her laws, even the law of per- 
spective, becomes a slave to the outer world, a 
forger of reality. He violates the innate truth 
that sanctifies the real creator. He is inferior 
to the child, for does not the child, as August 
Macke declares, “create directly out of his in- 
most feelings, and this to a greater degree than 
the imitators of Greek forms?’ Hence, like the 
destructive impulse of the child, comes the over- 
powering desire to disintegrate nature, to tear 
her own syntheses apart and recompose her ele- 
ments nearer to the heart’s desire. 

Art transcends nature. Expressionistic or ab- 
solute Art would transcend all the simulacra of 
nature which Art has made in her name or its own. 


ery 
ED 


THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 11 


The theory of the art purity and art sanctity 
of the child has in it something mystically es- 
oteric, with rudiments of the religious-senti- 
mental. ‘The affinity between the instantaneous 
seizure and registering of the external world by 
the fresh and uncorrupted infant hand and fancy, 
and the artificial products of the mature Expres- 
sionist artist has been admirably shown by Dr. 
G. F. Hartlaub in his book, “Der Genius im 
Kinde.” Were are drawings which the greatest 
masters of Expressionistic art might well envy. 

The next step upward from the infantile in- 
spiration was the adoration of the art of the primi- 
tive peoples, even of cavemen drawings, of 
Polynesian motifs, as in the rich and smoldering 
paintings of Max Pechstein, in short of “nigger- 
ism,” and that exotic Africanish element which 
we find in the work of many Continental painters 
and sculptors of to-day. The two-dimensional 
friezes of the Egyptians, the bronzes of Benin in 
Africa, the ivory carvings of the Congo tribes— 
that weird savage Gothic of the Dark Continent— 
are regarded with great veneration by most mod- 
ern Expressionists. 

Truth, according to the Expressionistic credo, 
is not coincident with the outer world of nature, 
but coincident with the inner world of the artist. 





12 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


But in what degree is the artist God wholly free 
and immune from the bondage of the crass, pal- 
pable, hard-ribbed world? Where is the bound- 
ary-line between production and reproduction? 
Where, in the unceasing flux and flow, the metab- 
olism of impressions from without and impres- 
sions from within, is the fixed arc and focus to 
be found—that inevitable point or moment at 
which the current of impressions is apotheosized 
into the divine product, Art? In the rays and 
vortices, in the splashes, explosions and convul- 
sions of form and color in a painting by Kan- 
dinsky, what law, or even what impulse led to the 
laying on this color instead of another, the draft- 
ing of a straight instead of a curved line? The 
artist will jealously and proudly maintain that 
every stroke is inevitable, but we knew that this 
is an illusion, for to accept it would signify a 
surrender to a kind of fatalism which would de- 
grade the artist from his rank as a creator to that 
of a mere medium or agent. The artist may see 
things as he asserts in paint that he has seen them, 
but since he cannot give his eyes to another, his 
product and its aspect in relation to its creator 
remains insulated and isolated forever. In a 
painting, say, by Oskar Kokoschka in which a 
fresh-faced, handsome young woman becomes 





THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 13 


converted into a blear-eyed hag—a man in his 
prime dissolved into the likeness of a lunatic or 
of one dead for a month—a child, as in his 
“Knieendes Madchen,” given the attributes of 
middle age—what new vision is necessary in 
the spectator of such a painting in order to trans- 
late these forms and colors into the values given 
them by their creator? 

It is one of the anomalies of abstract expres- 
Sionistic art that no flight is actually possible 
from the naturalistic into the purely abstract or 
absolute—for even in its most arbitrary concep- 
tions we find that some prototype exists in na- 
ture. Let us, for example, close our eyes, and 
by vigorous rubbing set the wheels and arcs of 
color, light and multiform shapes flaring and re- 
volving in the blood beneath the lid—in the eye- 
ball and the brain. Could we seize or hold fast 
in pigment one of these kaleidoscopic effects— 
what would the result be? Surely Expressionis- 
tic art—for are there not thousands of paintings 
of this school resembling what we would see? 
Yet such a picture would, after all, be only an 
impressionistic one, since it would be a mere re- 
production of nature—of a natural phenomenon. 
Only in its outward form would such a painting 
be expressionistic—a visualization of something 





14 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


“inwardly” seen, but seen with the fleshly, not 

with the spiritual eye, and no more abstract, sub- 
-stanceless art, than would be a photograph of 
blood corpuscles. And yet it is a music, a sym- 
phony of color, rhythmic with the direct pulse of 
life. The Expressionist would naturally disown 
such a “reproduction,” as arising from the reac- 
tion of the physical organ and not of the soul— 
something inconceivably more rarified. But what 
is there in the organ or faculty of the soul or im- 
agination which has not been previously estab- 
lished in the senses—reacting from the visible, 
tangible world? 

Even in their most impassioned flight from 
reality, even in the martyrdom imposed upon 
their hands and fancies in the desperate effort 
to transmute their work into pure spirit without 
face or form, the Expressionists are indissolubly 
fettered to the remembered forms or colors or 
meanings of things. The circles, ovals, rods, 
lightnings and lines in Kandinsky’s abstract 
drawings or compositions seduce the eye and 
fancy to associations with reality. To get over 
this difficulty or to explain it away, Rudolf 
Blimner, himself a prophet of absolute painting, 
has coined the terms primary and secondary 
forms. The forms created by the true Expres- 





THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 15 


sionist are primary, those with which we asso- 
ciate them are secondary. But here, it is clear, 
we are face to face with the old problem: which 
was first, the egg or the hen? The expres- 
sionist artist himself confesses that he can create 
no forms other than those which already exist in 
the Cosmos. His flight therefore is from the 
syntheses of these forms to the rudiments of 
them by way of disintegration, from Evolution 
to Devolution, back to the Archtype or the mere 
germ of the Archtype, even to Chaos. 

Coiled in the very womb of his own primeval 
fire-mist, he seeks to shape the world anew, feels 
himself as God, as Creator out of the Urstoff— 
the primeval matter of the spirit as of flinty plan- 
ets. ‘This tremendous revolt from the world of 
to-day, this panic fright of the hell without, with 
war, imperialism, organized mass-poisoning and 
all the horrible machinery of a desouled universe 
at last nakedly revealed, has sent the true and in- 
spired Expressionist upon a new search for God. 
The high priests of the movement cite even 
Thomas Aquinas who differentiated the species 
impresa and the species expresa. “The species 
impresa (or impressionism) is the part of the sin- 
ful or carnal man, the species expresa (or expres- 
sionism) is the part of the angels and of souls lib- 


rice A 


16 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


erated from the body.” It is not only the flight 
from reality, nature, space and time which is the 
motive force behind this new dispensation in art. 
It is also the triumph of the cosmic over the per- 
sonal, the destiny of all humanity in opposition 
to the destiny of the individual man. 

All this hints at a new romanticism—the es- 
tablishment of a fictive world, a refuge from the 
actual one. Yet to call the Expressionist a Ro- 
mantic or Neo-romantic would be an error. The 
Romanticist creates a world upon the pattern of 
the real world, only infinitely fairer and therefore 
false, and deliberately shuts his eyes to the as- 
perities and ugliness of Reality. He denies life 
as an ordeal and his Romanticism is to him a drug 
or an anodyne. But the true Expressionist not 
only realizes and expresses the real world—that 
is, its veritable soul, as he declares, but he is as 
pitiless toward his own feelings as toward those 
of his fellow men. The inherent, the arcane 
truth is what he seeks and this explains the hid- 
eousness, the inhuman, other-worldly terror and 
strangeness that dwell in much expressionistic art. 

Many Expressionists, when halted or harried 
by bolts of logic, seek refuge in the analogies and 
parallelisms of music—the most abstract of all 
arts. Hermann Bahr, the distinguished Aus- 








a > 
rr] sig Coe N 
eas 


THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 17 


trian author, in his brilliant exposition of the Ex- 
pressionist message, soul and vision, denounces 
the Impressionist as a “man degraded to be the 
gramophone of the external world.” Expres- 
sionism on the other hand is to him “‘eye music” — 
“optical harmony.” That which the composer 
hears with inward ear and sets down in notes 
which, interpreted and translated by instruments, 
transfer his mood or feeling to other souls, the 
Expressionist painter sees with his inward eye 
and sets down graphically to operate upon the 
outward eye of others. 

This deliberate confusion of the arts and the 
senses contains more than one fallacy. One need 
point out only one great difference—the conti- 
nuity of music and the simultaneity of painting— 
music motor-progressive in time and space, paint- 
ing static and fixed in time and space. This ob- 
jection is not rendered less valid by the conten- 
tion that the ear takes in only one note after 
another. Music is a motor art, a living flow, a 
defilation of notes, each, perhaps, related to and 
bound up with the one preceding and the one fol- 
lowing. Painting is an array of colors and 
forms which, once precipitated, are eternally and 
simultaneously coéxistent—before and after. A 
close approach to the nature of music is made pos- 


AT we, AO Sa fe See 
AE TRS) See ee 


18 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


sible through the medium of the painting in 
motion, particularly through the agency of the 
film, as I explain in “The Visible Symphony.” 
But in static painting all “action” is but petri- 
fication compared to the living dynamics of 
music. The elements of rhythm and vibration 
establish the real relation between the two arts, 
as between the two senses through which each 
becomes manifest, and this relation is as the 
relation between the waves of the luminiferous 
ether and the waves of the air. 

Though aware of its incompleteness, I have 
ventured to offer this definition of Expressionism: 
direct action in art—the forthright naked im- 
pulse, delivered without intermediaries, straight 
from the imagination to the outer world—like a 
child from the womb. Familiarity with the in- 
fluences that have dominated the movements in 
art during the centuries must. teach us that this 
impulse is not a new invention or discovery. 
The Expressionists themselves are constantly dis- 
covering devotees of the expressionistic formula 
in masters ancient and modern, as, for example, 
in some of the Gothic and pre-Raphaelite painters 
and sculptors. Thus Max Pechstein declares 
that his conversion to Expressionism took place 
many years ago in Siena when all his senses 








THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 1g 


throbbed in the contemplation of a certain picture 
of Giotto’s in which a sky-blue Christ was seated 
upon a rose-red donkey which was relieved 
against a violet wall, this in turn rising out of an 
olive-green ground. ‘The spontaneous rapture of 
Byzantine and Gothic sculptors and painters, dis- 
torting nature in the sheer fiery abandon of adora- 
tion and creation, brought forth expressionistic 
art, as many a cathedral and relic still expresses. 

These works were wrought in days when man’s 
vision was not only clarified but partly blinded 
by an inner light, and when he was less observant 
and analytical of the world about him. In many 
of the drawings of Albrecht Diirer we find the 
expressionistic trait or manner—the ‘Melan- 
cholia” though naturalistic in composition, is ex- 
pressionistic in inspiration. This applies also to 
the intense ecstatic visions and emotional passion 
of Matthias Griinewald’s altar pieces, and to the 
strange, spiritualized and apocalyptic landscapes 
of Hercules Seegers, an almost forgotten Dutch 
etcher of the 17th century—a forerunner of ex- 
pressionistic visualization. In William Blake 
the expressionistic inspiration and aspiration are 
clearly visible as well as in such moderns as the 
French Cézanne, the Swiss Hodler and the Nor- 
wegian Munch. All these men, though still us- 





20 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


ing naturalistic symbols, wrought expressionisti- 
cally—with this passion of inwardness dominat- 
ing theme and treatment. 

Franz Marc, the painter who like his colleague, 
August Stramm, the poet, was killed in the war, 
was one of the first prophets of Expressionism in 
Germany. He had distilled his art into some- 
thing which while not entirely deforming nature 
or converting it into a gaseous form or a schematic 
diagram, nevertheless transcended it. ‘Thus ir 
his picture, “Tiger,” we have actually the essence, 
the soul, the very nature of the tiger presented 
and compressed in a single conventionalized head 
and in the summary of characteristic attitudes. 
Marc Chagall, who like Kandinsky and Archi- 
penko, is a Russian by birth, expresses his world 
—that of the soil, the village, the peasant and 
the animal—by means of rudimentary forms and 
fragments presented in an utterly naive and 
primitive manner—the “‘thoughts” of the moujik, 
the “thoughts” of the beast, the thoughts of the 
painter himself assuming concrete form and as- 
sembling themselves into one complex or maze, 
even though some of the figures are shown stand- 
ing on their heads as in the image cast by a photo- 
graphic lens. Paul Campendonk follows a simi- 
lar method and choice of subjects. Paul Klee 





ae ass 


THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 21 


with ragged, uncertain and even dirty strokes of 
the pen, would seem ambitious of conveying the 
spasmodic and nebulous cerebral or nervous re- 
action to visual stimula, one thought or image 
connected with or tangential to another—a med- 
ley of forms and the spores of forms, apparently 
childish in conception and execution and adhering 
loosely or closely one to another, like so many 
ganglia with their cells or elements floating in the 
general fry of the drawing—as in the “Boot- 
verleiher.” 

Rudolf Bauer is of the school Kandinsky and 
dissolves himself into subtle symbolisms of “pri- 
mary” forms, colors and movements. César 
Klein and Max Pechstein revert to a kind of 
Edenic Expressionism—the Polynesian primitive 
with many a light and tint borrowed from Gau- 
guin—rude, smoldering, powerful work. They 
transmute the whole European cosmos into the 
glow and heat of the South Sea jungle, white 
Caucasian skin into ruddy reds and browns and 
fallow ochres, yet never relinquish their firm hold 
upon naturalistic forms—ingeniously conceived. 
Lyonel Feininger, an American by birth, who has 
lived for thirty-five years in Germany, has 
gone through various phases of Expressionism. 
Through these ascendant phases and stages, he 


ay oh IN aL an 4 ae 
Bs 
u 


22 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


has by degrees become the most spiritual and as- 
- cetic of the Expressionists of Germany. His 
latest abstract paintings are filled with a strange 
transparency and luminosity, as of other or inner 
worlds, glassy walls and planes that carry the eye 
and soul to new infinities of light, radiance and 
distance beyond distance. Here indeed we ap- 
proach close to painting that has succeeded in 
fixing the “soul” of things, the astral body, as it 
were, of towns and other apparitions of the ex- 
ternal world, and causes the soul of the beholder 
to vibrate in unison with that of the artist. 
Yet Feininger, fervently bent upon rarifying his 
art more and more, must in the final analysis as- 
cend to absolute space, to the negation of all line 
and color, to the blank void—the Expressionist 
zealot’s progression to Nirvana. 

In addition there are a number of powentd 
painters and original and bizarre “graphiker” 
who have achieved solid reputations and an en- 
thusiastic following but who are recognized by 
the radical body rather as inverted than true ex- 
pressionists. Among the foremost of these are 
Willy Jaeckel with his rude sweep, his gigantic- 
grandiose treatment of biblical subjects, his 
adoration of the Earth and of a dull earthen 
color—a vision of exaltation goes through his 


THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 23 


work; Bruno Krauskopf with his delicate lumi- 
nous exploitation of vegetable and floral forms, 
giving them almost human and often spiritual 
significance; Erich Waske, a painter of boldest 
line and mass, of volcanic landscapes and dooms- 
day firmaments splendored by dying suns; Erich 
Heckel with strange glimpses of a world wrenched 
awry, yet presenting unfamiliar aspects of our 
own—as:in “The Glassy Day”; George Grosz, 
the caricaturist with a deliberately cultivated 
schoolboy technique of hard gritty lines and over- 
lappings, who has nevertheless converted it into a 
drastic medium for his semi-political, semi-erotic 
satire, burning with hatred of the former ruling 
classes of Germany, Edwin Ebertz, Heckendorf, 
Schmidt-Rottluff, the designer of the despoiled 
eagle-crow of Germany’s new coat-of-arms, 
Scharff, the sculptor, and many others. Even 
though they do not belong to the extreme or ab- 
solute wing of Expressionismus, these men have 
each their own fresh message and their indepen- 
dent freedom and courage. 

The Expressionist world of Germany embraces 
the whole zodiac of the arts and rounds itself out 
to something that rests upon an entire new Welt- 
anschauung. ‘The mystic nature of the Russians 
has, as a kind of feminine element, united itself 


24 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


with the metaphysical quality of the Germans, 
_and brought forth this new cosmogony of arts. 
Kandinsky was the ferment in painting, Archi- 
penko in sculpture. Architects, dramatists, 
poets, musicians destroyed the old forms that 
bound them and evolved new principles. The 
so-called German revolution acted as a great 
driving force and gave the whole movement an 
immense impetus and a broader political, social 
and historical significance than if it had begun 
purely as an esthetic revolution. 

The sculptor, fettered to the three-dimensional 
mass, has always encountered the greatest, al- 
most insurmountable difficulties in expressing the 
abstract, the symbolical or even the allegorical. 
Among the Expressionist sculptors of Germany 
who have proceeded entirely from the abstract, 
with only a faint memory or survival of natural- 
istic forms, Oswald Herzog occupies a lofty place. 
He has molded his “‘Plastéken’’ in strict accord- 
ance with his own intellectualized laws, his con- 
ception of physics, the play and interplay of 
forces and rhythms, the powers of outer space 
pressing against the material Earth, producing 
concavity and convexity, a series of waves, at- 
traction and repulse, dynamic rhythm. Rudolf 
Belling, another abstractionist, has conceived of 





at 


THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 25 


space itself as plastic and the air tracts and hol- 
lows of his remarkable figures are to him as posi- 
tive as the concrete solids—air for him has taken 
on a new relation to the thing submerged in it. 
Lehmbruck, a sculptor who attenuates his figures 
to the hypernatural tenuous spirituality we find 
in certain medizval sculptures, such as the St. 
Pierre of Moissac, has attained great popularity, 
though the “true” Expressionists disclaim him. 
Among architects Erich Mendelsohn has 
evolved his thesis of dynamic architecture and 
carried it into effect. The building, fecundated 
by the germ of the architect’s imagination, 
evolves itself from within in answer to the pres- 
sure of its own necessity and use. That is, the 
abstract building is first projected as an idea, this 
undergoes organic evolution, and part is added 
to part as by a kind of natural accretion under the 
dominance of the esthetic will of the creator. 
Bruno Taut has set up a new credo of archi- 
tecture, of the human passion for building, bound 
up with astral fancies and a revolutionary, uto- 
pian afflatus, a cult of color and an architectonic 
thapsody in floral or crystal forms. Hans 
Poelzig has striven for a new symphony and syn- 
thesis of architecture, making his art the vehicle 
of the dumb, unformulated hunger for an archi- 





26 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


tectural language felt, even though unconsciously, 
_ by the form-dumb, form-blind modern masses. 
There are strange dreamers like the brothers 
Luckhardt, bizarre phantasts like Hermann Fin- 
sterlin, practical revolutionaries like Walter 
Gropius, head of the famous Staatliche Bauhaus 
at Weimar, with his naked, blunt almost brutal 
cubistic masses, architecture per se, reminiscent in 
part of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In 
music Arnold Schénberg has achieved a reputa- 
tion and Herwarth Walden a fiercely loyal fol- 
lowing among the members of the “Sturm” group. 

In expressionistic literature the central and 
dominant note of the movement was an ecstatic 
element with which the new men sought to ex- 
pand and disintegrate and even explode the fet- 
ters and barriers of language. Language was to 
be deflated, to be melted and hammered down to 
its ultimates, stripped and shorn of all redundan- 
cies. A whole word was to be compressed and 
concentrated into a letter, a whole line into a 
word, a whole stanza or paragraph into a line. 
Expressionism became explosionism, the words 
fragments laden with quintessential extracts of 
sense, intelligible often only to the writer, a 
stenographic, telegramic style between the inter- 
stices of which super-significances were to lie 


THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 27 


packed like mortar between stones or which were 
to serve as lightning rifts in whose divine glare 
whole landscapes were to lie revealed. In the 
poetry of the late August Stramm, in that of 
Johannes Becher, Lothar Schreyer and others, the 
verse forms often became mere grids, mere skele- 
tons or vertebre, word piled upon word like the 
elements in a Voltaic pile. But the words them- 
selves remained obdurate, unplastic, dead, despite 
the highstrung fury that played about them. 
Bound by chains of association, by links of con- 


notation, by earth-fast roots of age-old usage, 


by color or content, the word remained invested 
with its own essence and could not be forced to 
vibrate with the often chaotic, incommensurable 
thought of the poet. The brain of the reader 
apprehended only the word and its penumbra. 
The speech, tortured by these Procrustean me- 
chanics, became stammering, staccato, a network 
through which the esoteric meaning, often a very, 
thin one, slipped and was lost. 

Yet in this balling-together (Zusammenbal- 
lung) and compression of speech, there lay an 
effort in the right direction—even though the 
medium would not rise to the level of the flaming 
will that strove to force it to a kind of hyper- 
accentuation. In certain poets such as Franz 





28 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Werfel and Martin Buber, the expressionistic ele- 
ment is more evident in the content and manner 
than in the form, a feverish exaltation, an other- 
worldliness, lighting and flickering through the 
lines. In the diabolical work of the scabrous 
Curt Corrinth (‘‘Bordell,” etc.) the abrupt, stac- 
cato form took on a tremendous é/an and restless- 
ness which in combination with the humorous- 
erotic theme, produced effects that were convul- 
sively original, though in the end, exhausting. 
With the dramatists the dialogue, to some extent 
already adumbrated by Carl Sternheim with his 
omission of articles and personal pronouns, took 
the form of a sublimation of individual speech 
into cosmic speech. The medium or impelling 
force was again ecstasy. The characters were 
stripped of their personality and designated 
merely as The Father, The Son, The Millionaire, 
The Workman, etc. The fate of the individual 
was no longer of moment: always he was the 
organ, the symbol of the community or of human- 
ity—a type. These abstractions were subordi- 
nated to the function of parts of a machine, the 
machine of life, of society, of the world. 
The speech of these carriers or puppets, as in 
Georg Kaiser’s “Gas,’’ was as the explosion of a 
gas compressed in cylinders under the pressure of 


atime tn 
i 


THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM — 29 


the author’s will or inspiration. All extraneous 
parts were lopped away from this speech—the 
personal pronoun “I” almost vanished, the pro- 
nouns of the second person too—all became uni- 
versal. The dialogue was almost uniformly 
under pressure, a pressure so direct, so vehement 
in its expressure, as actually to resemble the dis- 
charge of mechanisms, each discharge preparing 
the mechanism for a new charge. In this kind 
of dialogue, the drama not only drove itself along 
by the cogwheels of the strophe and antistrophe 
of the dialogue, but by shocks and concussions. 
The intensity and compactness of the lines and 
their declamation called for a corresponding in- 
tensity of attention on the part of the audience. 
The danger of this continual over-emphasis is 
obvious—a monotony that deprives itself of all 
shadow and all relief. But since the Expression- 
ists had declared that every word of their texts 
was as valuable and as important as every other, 
each demanded an. equal stress. The words fall 
like blows of a hammer, like thrusts of a foil; 
the dramatic convention takes on a new face and 
voice, a new manner of intonation, varied chiefly 
by the individuality of each enactor. In plays 
such as Walter Hasenclever’s “Antigone,” the ac- 
tion unrolled itself to the tempo of swift succes- 


30 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


sive screams, and ecstasy, no longer to be main- 
_tained, led to cold anti-climaxes. In Ernst 
Toller, the young revolutionary playwright, the 
dynamics behind the themes derive their force 
chiefly from the fires of social revolt, the aspira- 
tion toward betterment of life for the masses. 
The challenge of the guilty older generation and 
of the society it brought forth, by the younger 
men, clarified by suffering and catastrophe, or 
made morbid by brooding upon human wrongs, 
finds expression in such half-ecstatic, half-hysteri- 
cal dramas as Hasenclever’s “Sohn” and Arnold 
Bronnen’s ‘“Vatermord.”’ 

The dance, like music, is claimed by the Ex- 
pressionists (for once in agreement with all non- 
Expressionists) as one of the purest and most 
immediate of arts, almost void of all auxiliary 
agencies. To them it is the art of movement, 
elaborated, in the art of the actor, into an addi- 
tional art, that of speech-art (Sprechkunst). 
Both these arts, like sculpture itself, are actually 
two-dimensional, since all of them present to the 
eye only a picture fixed or moving upon a flat 
plane. The three-dimensional in space cannot 
be seized by the eye, but only by the sense of 
touch. Recession and progression are mere 
tricks of optical perspective. ‘The pure art of 





THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM — 31 


the dance remains art—autonomous art—even 
when executed by marionettes or abstract figures, 
dependent not upon a set theme, but upon the 
artistic relation in which they stand to one an- 
other. 

The revolt of Expressionism against the pre- 
vailing and the traditional brought forth the 
imitative and the fraudulent to a greater de- 
gree than any other art movement. Impression- 
ism, however abrupt its break may have been with 
the realism or naturalism of the former schools, 
nevertheless remained bound, however prismati- 
cally, to the vision of external nature. This 
naturally demanded a capacity for representing 
and imitating nature, technical and graphical skill 
and training. But Expressionism denied the need 
of an artistic training—through its very nature it 
could not admit the authority of another will 
from without, of a master who was also a teacher. 
“Schools” of Expressionism are therefore to that 
degree a repudiation of the idea of Expression- 
ism. Actually the Expressionist is born, not 
made, and since all men are born, all men are in 
the degree of their natural capacity Expression- 
ists in the art which they spontaneously evolve 
or express—even the infant—the purest artist 
of them all. This dogma has given a certain 


32 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


specious logic to the philosophy of the maddest 
. Dadaists and to the infantile humors of such 
ultra-radicals as Kurt Schwitters and his “Merz” 
art. This consists of constructionist composi- 
tions built up of bits of raw or painted wood, 
wires, discs, fragments of newspaper advertise- 
ments and tram tickets—humblest materials with 
which, as he declares, the highest art may be 
achieved—‘“‘arrangements’” in  matter-creation. 
Expressionist dogma carried to its logical con- 
clusion would postulate this: ‘There can be no 
false Expressionistic art, since every expression 
of an inner impulse must, like the impulse itself, 
be natural and as inevitably personal as the 
voice or signature of the individual. Every 
Expressionist thus has or must have his own pro- 
nounced and unique “style’—a law that holds 
good in all art—whatever its tendency. 

The ease, the apparent ease, with which Ex- 
pressionism expressed itself naturally brought 
about disastrous consequences. Every scrawl or 
daub, every bizarre or half-decorative array of 
lines, often the result of random trifling or of 
the insolent presumption of those to whom all art 
was alien and whose efforts often seemed nothing 
more than a bad or shameless joke, was received 
as solemnly authentic art. “Works” which 





THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 33 


might actually have been born of the spasmodic, 
half-mechanical, half-conscious movements of a 
child, were received as true and inspired art. 
There were creations, the lifeless and spurious 
origin of which for once gave ample justification 
to the immemorial cry of “fool” or ‘‘charlatan,”’ 
launched by the “culture philistines’” whenever 
anything new dawned upon the horizon of their 
school- and memory-limited lives. These cries 
were now intensified by a fierce revulsion and 
fury into screams of “‘swindlers” and “madmen,” 
and a new Thirty Years’ War in the field of art 
seemed about to unloose itself with true religious 
fervor throughout artistic Germany. The imi- 
tators brought great discredit upon the whole 
movement and gave weight to the prophecy of its 
early death—as a mere accompaniment or phe- 
nomenon of the disrupted times. It was not 
easy to distinguish the sincere expressionists from 
the mere imitators, since all forms and stand- 
ards were not only lacking, but even inadmissible. 
The real criterion became something that tran- 
scended all rules, tradition and logic—a Kunst- 
schauen or Kunstgefihi—a natural gift. But 
alone the initiate, the adept was blessed with 
these, and was thus able to pierce beneath the 
mask of the work and to trace back its incep- 


34 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


tion to the heart or soul—or the mere ape instinct 

_ and the dead mimicry of the empty hand. 
Expressionism is thus, at least in its present 

stage, an art alone for artists, despite its strivings 


for universality. Yet even the uninitiate are — 


able to discern, or feel, without the exhortation 
of the mystigogues, the difference between one 
of Lyonel Feininger’s sublimated abstract draw- 
ings or paintings, and the uncertain, arbitrary and 
bewildered efforts of one of the myriads of im- 
posters—the Expressionists from without. The 
movement has reached its climax; its waves no 
longer lurch to and fro so madly and mountain- 
ously—the spume, driftwood and derelicts carried 
along by this new Gulf Stream in art have sunk 
or been cast ashore. There are critics who, hav- 
ing hailed the new vision with shouts of rapture 
and the triumph of ingenuous discovery, now pro- 
claim it to be dead or dying. But this is not true. 
Pablo Picasso’s reputed volte-face from Cubism 
back to Ingres has drawn a number of painters in 
every country with him. The first convulsions, 
often the work of the more parasitic elements, 
have subsided and the disruptive effects of this 
esthetic dynamite have become less noticeable 


because the old fabric is already loosened in all 


its joints and the strange solvents have pene- 





THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 35 


trated into the art of every land. Many again 
have renounced Expressionism because they have 
wearied of it as a fad, or because they could not 
keep pace nor maintain breath with a movement 
that left the easy and comfortable beaten track 
and disclosed itself only to the devotee. The eye 
of the up-growing generation, already attuned to 
its aspects, no longer finds expressionistic art 
pure chaos or anarchy. 

The summary of the Expressionistic creed or 
formula may be stated as follows: The im- 
mediate expression which the artist receives and 
transfers to canvas or to paper is not art. Nor 
is the presence of feeling or temperament in the 
work to be considered as art. Nor is art to be 
attained by the reproduction of an object, a feel- 
ing or an impression, but only by the transmuta- 
tion of this impression into art, into an artistic 
relationship of means of rhythm. “The repro- 
duction of an impression,” says Bliimner, “is not 
art; it remains impression. It is only through 
transformation to the purely artistic, that is, the 
pure, abstract vision of this impression—that we 
attain to expression—Expresstonism. The forma- 
tion of the individual experience (impression) 
by virtue of art, results in the work of art.” 

This esoteric and cryptic definition is in keep- 





36 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


ing with the mysticism and obscurantism of Ex- 
_ pressionism, and its reaching forth to the Cosmic 
and the Immanent. Hermann Bahr, already 
comfortably and monkishly immersed in the warm 
clouds and waters of his Neo-Catholicism, has 
striven, citing copiously from Goethe’s lesser 
known scientific and esthetic works, to draw 
many a parallel between his dicta in art and the 
aspects of modern Expressionism. Goethe in his 
“Data for a History of the Theory of Color,” 
points out that there are sciences for which knowl- 
edge does not suffice, sciences which must tran- 
scend themselves and become something higher— 
that is to say, Art. “Since nothing whole can be 
created either out of Knowledge or out of Reflec- 
tion, because the first is lacking in Inwardness 
and the second in Outwardness, we are forced to 
think of Science (Wéssenschaft) as Art, whenever 
we expect a sense of Entirety from it. . . . But 
in order that we should be able to fulfill such a 
demand we must exclude no human force or 
faculty from scientific participation. The pro- 
founds of intuition, a firm contemplation of the 
present, mathematical depth, physical accuracy, 
the acme of reason, the keenness of intellect, the 
phantasy moving and full of yearning, a fond joy 
in the sensuous—none of these can be omitted in 





ie 1! as Se 
43 o oh 


THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 37 


order to seize the propitious moment and exploit 
it in a live and fruitful sense, that moment which 
alone can give birth to a work of art, no matter 
what its content may be.” 

If Expressionism is to be regarded not merely 
as a force which loosened up and disintegrated the 
petrified forms and conglomerations which tradi- 
tion, blind usage and the Ape-in-Man had im- 
posed upon humanity like so many other 
tyrannies, but as a positive and vital revelation 
in itself, its value to America is clear. But even 
if it be regarded as esthetic Ecrasite, as some- 
thing chiefly destructive, its value should be 
clear. Our art, being composed of all the tradi- 
tions and all the faiths of Europe, requires more 
than any other, a pronunciamento of liberation, 
a creed to illuminate and vivify. The petrifica- 
tions of the centuries have become prisons for us. 
The Classic shackles of Greece and Rome, the 
seductive poison of Paris, the sentimental hollow- 
ness and literary artificiality of the British 
Academy and the Neo-classic or pre-Raphaelite 
tradition, have been accepted by us humbly and 
unquestioningly. This was, perhaps natural 
for a colonial people, but the continuance of this 
esthetic serfdom, means the continuance of na- 
tional eunuchism in art, of that mimicry with 


38 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


which an inferior culture does homage to the 
superior, and, unless the will to emulate or tran- 
scend it be active, vitiates itself. 

It is, of course, inevitable that as the children 
and heirs of Europe we should have accepted 
the European traditions. But the homogeneous 
peoples of Europe each colored and reshaped this 
tradition in obedience to the spirit of the race, 
national idiosyncrasy and the powerful, inex- 
haustible resources of their folklore. We, how- 
ever, have accepted the whole apparatus and 
paraphernalia ready-made, and it has remained 
sterile in so far as our power to give these forms 
a new content is concerned. Our tastes, tradi- 
tions and prejudices in art are all derivative 
through mass memory and mass movement. ‘Pas- 
sions in art we have none, not even the passion of 
our immutable orthodoxy. In our art we have 
attained a “normalcy” almost as rigid, dead and 
uniform as the interchangeable parts of our auto- 
mobiles. 

Our cultural danger as a young people now 
_ grown almost adult lies in our spiritual subjec- 
tion to peoples already grown old—to Europe in 
general, and to England and France in particular 
—to the first in an intellectual-literary, to the 
second in an esthetic sense. 








THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 39 


Expressionism as a means to an end can serve 
ourends. It can teach us the lesson of a ¢piritual- 
esthetic contemplation so intense, pure and sacri- 
ficial that all ties and husks are cast off and the 
artist becomes invested with a new courage and a 
new freedom of creation almost as high and holy 
as the glory and fruition of creation itself. To- 
ward this consummation the burning particular- 
ism, the intense, brooding passion for the individ- 
ualistic and all its values, the intellectual fanati- 
cism ready to go to ruin for the sake of an idea 
or an ideal, which characterizes the German soul, 
can only be of inestimable service to those forces 
full of promise which are struggling for artistic 
liberty and recognition in the America of to-day. 
If our path in art is to lead to fruitful fields of 
untrammeled and indigenous production, we, one 
of the youthful nations of the world, must again 
borrow—this time something of the fire that now 
burns in the veins of two other youthful nations 
—Germany and Russia. In both art has again 
attained something of the mystical quality of a 
religion—of a Gottessuchen. Both nations are 
now working out their destiny in art in the 
shadow of defeat and under the burden of a great 
national agony. America, who has discovered 
Europe and feels herself uneasy in the light that 





40 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


still streams from her, should employ this light 
in setting her own House of Art in order, ridding 
herself first of all of her fatal conservatism in 
ideas and in art. This conservatism is only the 
child of Fear. And the materialism of our all 
too easy success and our wealth is as fatal to the 
spirit as the materialism that invests the putative 
victors in the World War. To learn from the 
vanquished would signify for us a new departure, 
a breaking-down of the bondage called Paris and 
Rome. 

If it be our fate to borrow until we have at- 
tained that security, that serenity and inner ex- 
altation which will give us the spiritual air and 
soil necessary for the growth of true art, then 
let us borrow words of battle, torches to burn 
and levers to dismantle our bastilles. Expres- 
sionism in its higher forms is such a dispensation 
—if we accept it in its purest sense. But those 
of us who have no illusions about our superficial- 
ity, our spasmodic enthusiasms, our burlesque 
cynicism, are also aware of the dangerous play- 
thing Expressionism would prove—if we were 
reckless enough to accept it as a plaything. In 
that event it would inevitably mean the wrecking 
of the Old and the suicide of the New. 





aS, Pk Get ai, eee a 
ial at ee? 


THE ESSENCE OF EXPRESSIONISM 41 


But hope has the right to be in the ascendant, 
for already there are signs that the new revelation 
has begun to wreak its will upon these younger 
and bolder spirits who are elected to wreak their 
will upon our art. 





II 
THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 


I 


Ir is not of Einstein’s theory of relativity nor of 
the fourth dimension that I would write. But of 
the sensuous conception of space, of space plas- 
tically felt in terms of art. Let us consider here 
space as a living factor in the picture play, space 
as a participant in the action, spirit, atmosphere 
and form of the film. 

Ever since the camera learned the trick of — 
manifolding in swift succession, the picture film 
has been a mechanical product, full of artificial- 
ity and even artfulness, but denied the breath 
and pulse of true art. It has been a mere me- 
dium of reproduction of the external lighted 
scene, a moving record of crass and unredeemed 
photography, however sumptuous some of its the- 
atrical or scenic effects, however fantastic and 
ingenious some of its mechanical and optical pos- 
sibilities. But art fled the lens which only the 
concrete reality or the constructed sham would 

42 


a op aie Reais eee f ~ 


THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 43 


enter. ‘Moving pictures’—“‘movies”—the pop- 
ulace pierced instinctively through all pretenses 
and named them for what they were. 

A true art for the film had not yet been in- 
vented or evolved. It had not yet found its true 
form, expression or convention. It was still the 
lively daughter of dead photography. A mock- 
world, the phantasm of the actual, projected it- 
self upon the screen in all the tones of black and 
white and seared itself upon our aching retine. 
It mimicked the photograph, the theatrical stage, 
the painted picture, the formal tableau. 

But at last the revolution of this world of light 
and shadow has begun—and in Germany. ‘The 
creative element has entered it. ‘The smug phan- 
toms, the gorgeous settings, the smirking dolls 
with bared teeth and ox-like eyes, the creased 
cavaliers, prettified puppies and exotic sirens are 
threatened in their easy monopoly of this world. 
The background which to them had been a mere 
foil for their mouthings, oglings and struttings, 
has become alive. 

The artist has slipped into this crude phantas- 
magoria and scenic slavery and has begun to 
create. He has seized upon unconjectured, £s- 
thetic, dramatic and optical possibilities. Space 
—hitherto considered and treated as something 


’ |» a oor oe 2.) a a 
{3 ‘ i at 
4 i “ ty < P rs 
ws 
’ t 


44 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


dead and static, a mere inert screen or frame, 
often of no more significance than the painted 
balustrade background at the village photogra- 
pher’s—has been smitten into life, into move- 
ment and conscious expression. A fourth di- 
mension has begun to evolve out of this photo- 
graphic cosmos. 

The sixth sense of man, his feeling for space 
or room—his Raumgefuhi—has been awakened 
and given a new incentive. Space has been 
given a voice. It has become a presence. It 
moves and operates by its distances and by its 
masses, static yet instinct with the expression of 
motion; it speaks with forms and with color val- 
ues. It has taken on something dynamic and 
demonic, demanding not only attention but trib- 
ute from the soul. It has become an obedient 
genius in league with the moods and dreams and 
emotions of the artist bent on forcing his will 
upon the starers-at-the-screen. 

This art, as I have already implied, is not a 
reflection of reality but a transformation of it, 
it may even be a distortion of it. The film is 
not to be a mere reproduction of life and the 
outer world, but a sublimation and adumbration 
of it—thus opening up many new perspectives. 





; 
ee poe? 
Ley 


~ 


THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 45 


The frozen and rigid forms and values of the 
outer and apparent world to which the lens and 
the sensitized celluloid strip are so relentlessly 
faithful, are broken up, dissolved and endowed 
with a new role. They are no longer a dead, 
two-dimensional background for the walking, 
kissing, dancing, murdering pantomimes and 
automata, but expressive presences, immanent 
forces that act not, but react and enact. 

They claim and exercise the right to share in 
the dumb action of the living. The frown of a 
tower, the scowl of a sinister alley, the pride and 
serenity of a white peak, the hypnotic draught 
of a straight road vanishing to a point—these 
exert their influences and express their natures; 
their essences flow over the scene and blend with 
the action. A symphony arises between the or- 
ganic and the inorganic worlds and the lens 
peers behind inscrutable veils. The human 
imagination is fructified and begins to react will- 
ingly or unwillingly. A new magic ensues, a new 
mystery possesses us. 

This new treatment of the sense of space and 
feeling for room was first given expression in a 
film entitled, “Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari.” 
It was described as the first expressionistic film 


46 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


and embodied many original and instructive 
ideas. The creators were Walther Reimann, 
Walther: Rohrig and Hermann Warm. 

These men did not wish to produce a series of 
new and startling pictures. What they under- 
took was a scientific and esthetic experiment in 
a new treatment of space. ‘The sculpturesque, 
plastic treatment of space—that is, the three- 
dimensional—opposes itself to the two-dimen- 
sional world of the painted picture. Yet paint 
and color are liberally made use of. It is as 
though the third dimension—depth—had actu- 
ally been added to the picture and had begun 
to develop itself—unto infinity, if you will. 
From this it would develop into the fourth di- 
mension which may be conceived as time. Pic- 
tures are condition—space is existence. Space 
overrides the mere picture as street architecture 
overrides a poster or a signboard. 

The adaptation of these laws and theories to 
the film was not mystic or esoteric, but very 
practical. A new instrument or medium is thus 
given us for playing upon the souls and imagina- 
tions of earth-dwellers. The film undergoes a 
kind of spiritual metamorphosis. ‘The creative 
artist works in mass and matter like a god, re- 
shaping the outer world or creating new worlds. 


“i 2 oh eg a 
tl Pelee 
te UE ero, ee 
et 
de lee 


THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 47 


The scenic architect comes into his own—he 
broods upon and dominates furniture, room, 
house, street, city, landscape, universe! 

Exaggeration and distortion of realistic or 
idealistic forms, the dissolving of the petrified 
Fxistent into other-worldliness or into arbitrary 
forms, are part of the expressionistic creed. We 
need not be discouraged nor have our respect for 
a new and vital principle lessened by the bizarre 
form it has been given. In this the film is but 
part of this subversive period. Its creativeness 
is at the same time dynamically destructive—a 
solvent of the old. It is partly chaos but only 
the chaos of the old, familiar and outworn, which 
reappear as disorganization,—as suggestion or 
survival matter retains its memory—the abstrac- 
tion would equal annihilation. 

The creators of “Dr. Caligari” as a film spec- 
tacle have used an audacious freedom in their 
exploitation of space. The plastic is amal- 
gamated with the painted, bulk and form with 
the simulacra of bulk and form, false perspective 
and violent foreshortening are introduced, real 
light and shadow combat or reinforce painted 
shadow and light. Einstein’s invasion of the law 
of gravity is applied and becomes visible in the 
treatment of walls and supports. 


ot en ee 
ay Oi: eo 


48 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Trees are resolved into conventionalized, con- 
structed forms, foliage becomes a mass of light, 
dark and shaded crescents, rounds and silhouettes 
—brilliantly colored in the original scene. 
Floors and pavements are streaked, splashed and 
spotted, divided and decorated in bars, crosses, 
diagonals, serpentines and arrows. The walls 
become as banners or as transparencies, space 
fissured by age, or as slates upon which the light- 
ning blazes strange hieroglyphs. Or they be- 
come veils and vanish in a mosaic of scrambled 
forms and surfaces, like a liner in camouflage. 
A grim effort is made to extend perspective not 
only in flight from the spectator—that is, toward 
the background—but into and beyond the fore- 
ground, to overwhelm the spectator with it, to 
penetrate and transfix him with its linear life, 
to draw him into the trammels, the vortex of the 
action. 

The first effect that strikes the eye in the 
Caligari film is the plastic richness and accen- 
tuation of all masses. We are plunged into a 
cubistic world of intense relief and depth, a ster- 
eoscopic universe. The modelling of the scenery 
is emphasized by painted high lights, by artificial 
shadows, by bands of color outlining masses and 
contours, 





le ES eS iene 


THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 49 


A corridor in an office building: Walls veer- 
ing outward from the floor, traversed by sharply 
defined parallel strips, emphasizing the perspec- 
tive, and broken violently by pyramidal openings 
streaming with light, marking the doors, the 
shadows between them vibrating as dark cones 
of contrast; the further end of the corridor 
murky, giving vast distance. In the foreground 
a section of wall violently tilted, as it were, over 
the heads of the audience. The floor crypti- 
cally painted with errant lines of direction—the 
floor in front of the doors shows cross lines, indi- 
cating a going to and fro, in and out. The im- 
pression is one of formal coldness, of bureaucratic 
regularity, of semi-public traffic. Life is given 
to this architectural energy, human life, by the 
wizard-like shape of Dr. Caligari himself, white- 
haired, bespectacled, in a bulky cloak and tall 
hat. His cane touches, and seems like an exten- 
sion of, one of the floor lines. The actor must 
fit himself into the composition in costume, ges- 
ture and attitude. 

A street at night: Yawning blackness in the 
background—empty, starless abstract space; 
against it a square, lop-sided lantern hung 
between lurching walls. Doors and windows 
constructed or painted in wrenched perspective. 


50 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Dark segments on the pavement accentuate the 
diminishing effect. The slinking of a brutal 
figure pressed against the walls, and evil spots 
and shadings on the pavement give a sinister 
expression to the street. Adroit diagonals lead 
and rivet the eye. 

An attic: it speaks of sordidness, want and 
crime. The whole composition a vivid intersec- 
tion of cones light and dark, of roof lines, shafts 
of light and slanting walls; projection of white 
and black patterns on the floor, the whole geo- 
metrically felt, cubistically conceived. This 
attic is out of time, but in space. The roofs and 
chimneys of another world arise and scowl 
through the splintered window pane. 

A room, or, rather, room that has precipitated 
itself, incloses itself in cavern-like lines, in in- 
verted hollows of frozen waves. Here space be- 
comes cloistral and encompasses the human— 
a man reads at a desk. A triangular window 
glares and permits the living day a voice in this 
composition. 

A garden: A figure in smooth black nakedness 
with a snow-white face moves with studied step 
and gesture along a painted wall. Across this 
crawl wave-like lines. Sharply-cut sections of 


Ly ‘ LSS ea 





THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 51 


sky—tree silhouettes and spots of sun, awnings of 
foliage severely conventionalized. 

A prison cell: A criminal, ironed to a huge 
chain attached to an immense trapezoidal “‘ball.” 
The posture of the prisoner sitting on his folded 
legs is almost Buddha-like. Here space turns 
upon itself, incloses and focuses a human destiny. 
A small window high up, and crazily barred, op- 
erates like an eye. The walls, sloping like a 
tent’s to an invisible point, are blazoned with 
black and white wedge-shaped rays. These bend 
when they reach the floor and unite in a kind of 
huge cross in the centre of which the prisoner 
sits, scowling, unshaven. The tragedy of the 
repression of the human in space—in a trinity of 
space, fate and man. 

A white and spectral bridge yawning and rush- 
ing out of the foreground: It is an erratic, ir- 
tegular causeway, such as blind ghouls might 
have built. It climbs and struggles upward al- 
most out of the picture. In the middle distance 
it rises into a hump and reveals arches staggering 
over nothingnesses. The perspective pierces into 
vacuity. This bridge is the scene of a wild pur- 
suit. Shafts of bifurcated cacti or skeleton 
shrubs lean at all angles along the parapet walls. 


52 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


expressing excitement and tumult. Lanterns, 
also at all angles, point to nowhere, battered out 
of the perpendicular as grass is driven obliquely 
by the suction of an express train. 

Several aspects of the market-place of a small 
town: An imposing and exposing play and in- 
terplay of masses, perspectives, lines, outlines, 
light and shadow, foreshortening of walls and 
arches. A lantern askew under an arch—the old 
lamplighter as the black core of an enormous star 
of light that is splashed upon the ground and 
eats into the shadows. A criss-cross play of light 
from doors and windows down the vistas of 
crooked streets in which the houses move and 
stretch, attract and repel one another. Channels 
full of latent human destinies. 

The town cries out its will through its mouth, 
this market-place, its fears and hopes assemble 
here, its century-old soul is laid bare. The spots 
and lines of travel on the cobblestones people it 
with the spectres of generations of passers-by. 
They are the symbolical stenogram of the town’s 
life and traffic. 

Another scene: Climax—catastrophe. A vi- 
sion of lurching roofs and pitching walls—the 
setting for another pursuit. The top of one wall 
is marked by a broad and tapering trail, shooting 








THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 53 


forward like an arrow, like a beam of flight or 
light, and at the arrow’s head a group—the tragic 
hero in his black skin-tight garment, carrying a 
white-clad woman in his arms, looming above 
vacuity, standing on the watershed between life 
and death. Gaunt chimneys rear and slant like 
masts in this city storm. Cunning lines of com- 
position and the adroit use of diagonals drive the 
perspective into an invisible “vanishing-point.” 
Two bright windows, trapezium-shaped, glow 
beneath in the world of men, directly under the 
roof. Here the outer husks, slopes and ridges 
of human habitations, man’s formal, architectonic 
division of space—overhead the universal ocean 
of space and time. Human destinies brought 
into sharp contrast with naked annihilation. 

Space as the eternal, the all-embracing, the 
all-absorbing. 


II 


An interpretation of space diametrically op- 
posed to that of the Caligari film may be seen 
in the light-play “From Morn to Midnight’ by 
Georg Kaiser. Here space is not treated as some- 
thing concrete and plastic but as something ab- 
stract—diffused—immaterial. Light and shadow 
are not massed, but broken and dissolved. 


54. NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


The original settings are not constructed in the 
round and in color, but are suggested in the 
flat in different tones of black and white. 

Space does not obtrude; the world becomes a 
background, vague, inchoate, nebulous. Against 
this obliterating firmament, this sponge of dark- 
ness, the players move, merge into it, emerge out 
of it. In order that they may not be visually 
lost, their hands, faces and the outlines of their 
clothing are relieved by means of high lights care- 
fully applied. 

In such surroundings the actor no longer feels 
the support of active space and a living environ- 
ment, but is flung back upon his own resources. 
He is stripped naked of accessories. He even 
loses much of his own corporeality and relief and 
becomes two-dimensional, an actual picture. 

The universe is flat—a plane—beneath and 
above it, before it and behind, primeval darkness 
rules, perspective is engulfed, life and action 
transpire in a world of breadth and height. 

A pawnshop: A rudimentary door in white 
lighting out of walls that are simply black empti- 
ness. Steps, the relief of which is destroyed by 
streaks and spots passing athwart both treads and — 
risers. ‘To left and right a jungle-like mass of 
amorphous odds and ends, pawnshop parapher- 








THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 55 


nalia, things that are material but half obliterated 
and negatived to ghostliness, to mere hints of 
themselves. The long-haired youth and the 
long-bearded pawnbroker take on almost the ap- 
pearance of phantoms. 

A staircase hall: Walls, as before of night 
and nothingness. The balusters, rail and steps 
in ghostly contours and semi-relief. A luminous 
clock like a moon in a sky of ink. An electric 
light, like a ragged giant bullrush or gourd, glows » 
on one wall, in the centre of a burst of painted 
rays. The corners of the in-leaning invisible 
walls are demarcated by white hatchings. A 
youth and a girl in strange attitudes, like figures 
in a dream. The whole phantasmal and limbo- 
like—like the spookish banqueting-hall in Strind- 
berg’s “Nach Damaskus.” 

The two-dimensional conception was forced to 
make compromises in several scenes, but even in 
these the third dimension was effaced and masked 
as much as possible. 

Thus in a Salvation Army hall, the foreground 
is curtained off in dead black, the middle ground 
is dazzling white, like plane contrasted with 
plane. The focus: a cross shining upon a plat- 
form, crippled chairs in disarray, crying of a 
world of want and moral decrepitude. 





56 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


When depth and distance are rendered neces- 
sary in this world of flatness, as on a country road, 
this too is indicated partly in relief—spectral and 
infernal trees, a serpentine path, winding among 
these solitary guardians and losing itself in in- 
finity—a path shadowy and without goal. 

The action in “From Morn to Midnight,” 
the settings of which strive to dissolve and 
negative reality and the outer world, is as har 
monious in its way as that in the Caligari film 
which strives to intensify and animate the fabric 
of this outer world. 


III 


Another filmplay, “Algol,” the scene of which 
is laid on the star of that name—a vision of Paul 
Scheerbart’s, the poet-architect—has also been 
“staged” by Walther Reimann. Here the forms 
are not broken up expressionistically, but space 
acts and speaks geometrically, in great vistas, in 
grandiose architectural culminations. Space or 
room is divided into formal diapers, patterns, 
squares, spots and circles, of cube imposed upon 
cube, of apartment opening into apartment. 

One scene represents a stellar landscape of 
abrupt and fantastic contours, a convulsed, vol- 
canic world, revealing matter in a struggle with 





THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 57 


space and time. There are surfaces of snow and 
silver, spines and crevasses, rounded tumuli of 
primeval stuff, sharp crags rising like outstretched 
arms to the stars. A female figure, like a tri- 
umphing spirit, and invested with veils of differ- 
ent darknesses, lifts out of the stone. Above her 
there is spanned arch upon arch of a borealis and 
swarm upon swarm of stars. A Dantesque vi- 
sion, the marriage of space and matter. Space in 
its ultimate juxtaposition with Eternity. 


IV 


Another interesting treatment of space in the 
world of the cinema is that devised by Prof. Hans 
Poelzig and Frl. Moeschke, the designer and the 
sculptress of Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus. 
The theme was “Der Golem,’ a fantastic, cabal- 
istic Jewish romance of ancient Prague, by 
Gustav Meyrink, one of the most imaginative of 
German writers. 

Professor Poelzig conceives of space in plastic 
terms, in solid concretions congealing under the 
artist’s hand to expressive and organic forms. 
He works, therefore, in the solid masses of the 
sculptor and not with the planes and the super- 
ficies of the painter. Under his caressing hands 





58 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


a weird but spontaneous internal architecture, 
‘shell-like, cavernous, sombre, has been evolved in 
simple, flowing lines, instinct with the bizarre 
spirit of the tale. 

These vaults and groins are hoary with an evil 
age, the mildew of suffering, hunger and prayer 
is upon them and in them. The gray soul of 
medieval Prague has been molded into these ec- 
centric and errant crypts. They suggest a kind 
of Jewish Gothic—a blending of the flame-like 
letters of the Jewish alphabet with the leaf-like 
flame of Gothic tracery. 

Poelzig seeks to give an eerie and grotesque 
suggestiveness to the flights of houses and streets 
that are to furnish the external setting of this 
film play. The will of this master architect, an- 
imating facades into faces, insists that these 
houses are to speak in jargon—and gesticulate! 

The shadowy ribbon of the light-play, hitherto 
overladen with photographic fetters, has freed 
itself from the iron reel and begun to soar upward 
toward a higher purpose and a nobler expression. 

It has spun through the brains of true artists 
and vitalized itself with an element of creative 
art. 

From this beginning may arise something 
which will enrichen not only art but life. 





THE VIVIFYING OF SPACE 59 


If alone our feeling for space be developed 
esthetically by the possibilities of the aéroplane, 
if alone this sixth sense grow subtler and sharper, 
we shall achieve a finer adjustment of man to his 
environment, a closer contact with the abstract 
and concrete worlds, a new harmony with nature 
and the universe. 

Man shall not only know by hypothesis that 
the world is not flat and still, but feel by sense 
and instinct that it is round and in flight. 

He shall know the Earth as his own house, 
though he may never have left his hamlet. 

The blurred narrow windows of his imagina- 
tion may then become doorways—wide and al- 
ways open. 





Hil 
A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY 


Tue sums of lives, the sums of money, directly 
engulfed by the war, may be reckoned up tithe 
and tittle by the inevitable statistician. For 
every shell, for every tin of beef, for every button 
there is some account or record—for every pane 
of glass that gleamed, for every cock that crew 
in villages that no longer exist. But for that 
which is more precious even than the lives which 
we whimper about as priceless,—till diplomats 
and demagogues by the wars they breed convince 
us that nothing is more worthless—for the high 
talents and undeveloped genius swallowed up by 
Moloch, there is and can be no accounting given. 
We know that remarkable gifts were destroyed, 
that countless youths with the glow of glorious 
promise and achievement upon their brows, went 
into the fiery furnace and did not return. The 
list is tragic and long, there has been an eclipse of 
stars of many magnitudes. 


Yet it was among the unknown that the great- 
60 





A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY 61 


est genius slumbered. Not knowing the nature 
or extent of our loss, our regret, our grief, is 
merely hypothetical. But now one of these un- 
known ones has re-arisen from the grave and 
speaks. He speaks through the body of the work 
he has left behind him. A youth, annealed in the 
fires of an indubitable and transcendent genius, 
presents his credentials for immortality. He re- 
veals himself to us, forces from us tributes of 
poignant regret. For all who are able to weigh 
the worth of the work of the young must recog- 
nize in this youth a genius of the first water—a 
mind preternaturally developed, a spirit magnifi- 
cently equipped to speak creatively to the world. 
“One who would have been a second, perhaps 
greater Goethe, has gone from us,” ran the ver- 
dict in Germany. We have a mass of astonish- 
ing evidence to warrant if not this, at least a very 
high prophecy. Some of it has recently been pub- 
lished by the father and the friends of Otto Braun 
in a book entitled, “Ein Frahvollendeter” (“One 
Early Come to Fruition”’). It contains ex- 
tracts from diaries and letters, as well as many 
poems. Not a line was ever intended for pub- 
lication. 

Otto Braun was the only child of Dr. Heinrich 
Braun, formerly a Socialist Member of the 





\ SS a 
mana ess RGN E: 
aye ty 1 cle 


62 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Reichstag and editor of ““The Annals of Social- 
Politics and Law,” and of Lily Braun, a distin- 
guished German novelist. She was of aristocratic 
stock, born a von Kretschmann, the daughter of a 
well-known general. It is said that her family 
descends from Jérome Napoleon. Her most fa- 
mous works are ““The Memoirs of a Woman So- 
cialist” and “In the Shadow of the Titans.” 
Otto was born in Berlin on June 27, 1897. 

The child attended school for only a brief time. 
The crystalline mind sparkled with such radiance 
from the very beginning that the ordinary school 
training, even that of a private institution, would 
have been an incongruity. He was provided 
with private tutors and every advantage and in- 
fluence his wise, gifted and highly-cultured par- 
ents considered fruitful or stimulating. They 
preserved him from all the narrowness of caste 
and creed. Creative reading, journeys to the 
Bavarian mountains, to the art cities of Italy, to 
the Mediterranean, to Paris, stimulating compan- 
ionship and the full exercise of all mental, spirit- 
ual and physical faculties—these were elements 
in the discipline he underwent. 

When the boy was twelve, Prof. J. Petzoldt, of 
Spandau, who had specialized for many years in 
the education of highly-gifted youth, petitioned 





A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY = 63 


the Prussian Board of Education for the privilege 
of release from some of his pedagogic duties in 
order to devote himself to the intensive education 
of Otto Braun. The petition was an impressive 
one, full of reverence and discriminate enthusi- 
asm. It was supported by a strong recommenda- 
tion by Prof. Wilhelm Ostwald, the famous 
scientist, and accompanied by various proofs of 
the wonderful precociousness of the lad. But 
such things as Ariel-like genius did not fit into 
the Prussian scheme of things educational. Pro- 
fessor Petzoldt received a curt and negative 
answer, expressing surprise at his audacious sug- 
gestion. 

The term “infant prodigy” is not wide nor deep 
enough to encompass the case of Otto Braun. 
The child of abnormal or supernormal ability— 
in music, in chess-playing, in play-acting, in 
mathematics—is known to all of us. Such 
amazing gifts are natural, subconscious, instinc- 
tive, mysteriously derivative or imitative. The 
brain is seldom taxed to any great degree, the cere- 
bration is indirect and not deliberate. ‘There is 
little that is productive or creative. As soon as 
the consciousness is switched from its one daz- 
zling, concentrated trick or speciality, the mind 
of the prodigy reverts to that of the ordinary 





64 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


child. Only once in some long-drawn cycle, 
after the gestation of many generations of Mass- 
enmenschen, does nature summon up energy 
enough to produce the premier genius. 

In the case of Otto Braun we have to deal with 
a human, mental phenomenon, gifted with facul- 
ties of a lofty order, with the exalted and the in- 
spirational, and with these strangely mature and 
developed. These faculties, even during the 
years of absorption, are productive and independ- 
ent. They shape judgments and are reinforced 
by a proud will to freedom from all the reflexes 
of imparted knowledge. There is no parrot-like 
repetition of mere reading—there is very little of 
that mimicry of culture or learning which sustains 
many a mature man and even many a fixed repu- | 
tation. The capacity of this young brain, not 
only for the absorption and digestion of a gigantic 
mass of knowledge, but for its coérdination and 
fertilization, is balanced by an equally astonish- 
ing creative faculty, by an individuality and a 
style. 

A true poet and thinker in a sailor suit and 
with Fauntleroy locks?—the thought is gro- 
tesque, disconcerting, even painful. The nor- 
mally mature mind is antagonized by this streak 
of the seraphic. For the sake of its own self- 





A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY 65 


esteem it is compelled to revolt, to deny, to seek 
some defense, some point of attack. Shall 
the youngest generation in the shape of babes, 
flying banners of indubitable superiority, come 
knocking at our towers of intellectual pride? 
Shall we who battle with the years as we crawl 
slowly to our goals, be overtaken in a day by 
Admirable Crichtons of children on condor 
wings? But this fear is groundless even for 
those in whom glimmers no spark of genius. 
We have to do here with the lightning of 
genius and genius of such an order that, as in 
the case of Chatterton, it seldom strikes twice in 
the same century. 

In 1910 Otto Braun’s parents removed to 
Zehlendorf, one of the farther suburbs of Berlin, 
where the boy could dream under great oaks and 
amidst fields and flowers. His training was, 
however, by no means an exotic, one. ‘The 
healthy animal impulses of boyhood burst through 
the burden of intellect. He loves to play with 
tin soldiers. He has heart-wracking love affairs 
with his flapper friends. He has quarrels and 
fist-fights with his schoolmates, as we may see in 
the following passage from a letter written to his 
mother from the school at Wickersdorf when 
he was nine: 


66 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


“Oh! I cannot tell you what unutterable, what tre- 
mendous joy possessed me! And why? Because for 
the first time I felt the blood of my ancestors well up 
and bubble in my veins, felt my fist clench ready to batter 
the skulls of my opponents—a most uplifting feeling! 
Well, I'll tell you all about it! W., this dog, this devil, 
this twenty-fold Voltaire in character, this embodiment of 
all intrigues .. .” 


In his diary he records his desire to be “earthy, 
wholly earthy.”’ Even at this age he sees his life, 
his work and his character before him as a build- 
ing just begun but already adumbrated by the 
destiny he feels within him. 

I am aware of the difficulty of presenting an 
adequate idea of this remarkable intelligence by 
means of a few translated fragments in a short 
paper—after his father and friends had found the 
utmost difficulty in making a selection for an en- 
tire book out of the wealth of material at their 
disposal. As gift books for his eleventh birthday 
he suggests the “Hyperion” of H6lderlin, the 
Poetics of Aristotle, the Constitution of Athens, 
Theocritus, and the poems of Hafiz. The im- 
pulse to form individual judgments is visible 
from the very beginning. He has, for example, 
been playing at parade with his tin soldiers, then 
taken a walk along the lake, reading “Tristan and 








A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY = 67 


Isolde.” ‘The wonderful tale of Rivalin and 
Blanchefleur is certainly a bit too sweetish, but 
it is like Giotto, a golden background for a sombre 
picture.” 

Deeply discontented at school, a great change 
comes over him. He writes to his mother: 


“A new religion is necessary ; humanity thirsts for this, 
hungers for it, yet dares not give vent to its longing—out 
of cowardice. What does the world need most? Love!” 


He flings off husk after husk of adolescence, 
emerges purged, rebellious and _ introspective 
from his period of Sturm und Drang. 


“I am free,” he writes in his diary in October, 1908; 
“I feel it—I am one who lives and creates—creates 
things that live. Ive shaken off all moldy things, all 
evil and ugliness. I’ve been raised to a region which 
gods frequent, ve become otherwise. One phase of my 
development lies behind me, a phase full of cobwebs and 
dirt, pearls without, rags within.” 


The potent energies, the mental and esthetic 
forces seething within him, he is able to recognize 
and evaluate. He is fully conscious of his 
“demon.” His intellectual penetration is whet- 
ted and polished like a fine blade; it is capable of 
splitting up illusions, legends and fallacies: 





Pe 


68 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


“I prefer Goethe to Schiller,’ he writes in August, 
1909. “Schiller has an idea, and then seeks some vehicle 
for it (Maria Stuart, Dunois, Carl Moor, Posa, etc.). 
But Goethe creates human beings and gives us life as 
it is, not as it should be. A favorite copy-book theme 
runs thus: ‘Why is it that Schiller succeeds in making 
Wallenstein appear sympathetic to us—in spite of his 
treason?’ Ill tell you: zt as precisely because of his 
treason. Wallenstein is one of the five live human be- 
ings whom Schiller succeeds in planting upon the stage— 
that which is human in him is nothing less than his trea- 
son. ‘Les passions, cest toute la richesse morale de 
l’homme’—I must emphasize this again and again. And 
yet a man with passions is surely not esteemed noble in 
the common acceptance of that term. How goes that 
verse of Pope’s which is directed against the repose of the 
spirit? Unfortunately I can find it only in the French 
translation: 

‘Plus notre esprit est fort, plus il faut qual agisse. 

Il meurt dans le repos, il vit dans Texercise.’” 


In the book there is a heliogravure portrait of 
Otto Braun at the age of twelve. It shows a 
childish face, round and handsome, with dark, 
contemplative eyes, a drooping mouth, the expres- 
sion grave, somewhat proud and defiant. The 
pose is easy and full of mature assurance: his 
hands in his pockets, his hair hanging in long locks. 
almost to his shoulders. 


‘Nietzsche stands on Luther’s shoulders, ridiculous as 





A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY — 69 


this may seem. Luther was a man, a daring man, true 
to his convictions, and I honor him as I honor all here- 
tics, all men who defy fear.” (November, 1909.) 


Though he had actually little experience with 
human nature, he is already, possibly through de- 
tivative influences, suspicious of it. Full of 
Machiavellian astuteness is the advice he gives 
his friend Stefan L., still at school: “Be as 
close-lipped as possible, yet appear as though 
built of glass. Do not strive to be the first in 
class, etc.”’ A deep disdain of the “model youth” 
speaks out of this sophistication—a certain pa- 
tronage, his by right, from the following: 


“You have brilliant, actually superb ideas, but— 


pardon the expression—you clothe them in very ornate 


and deliberately obscure forms. Go, dig down into 
your innermost self, ask yourself whether you do not 
often force yourself to adopt forms which are not a true 
reflection of your inner self. Only the form which 
comes honestly from within is capable of presenting our 
thoughts in a worthy shape to others.” 


May 12, 1910, to his father, from Munich: 


“In Rembrandt’s works we see everything boil and 
billow, rave and foam as though arisen out of hell. 
And what was it he invented as the supreme medium of 
his expression ?—his insane lighting. It is but seldom 
that he achieves peace and harmony, but when he does 
they are more than terrestrial.” 


Ve ee a PE OER 
= j J igh wile EY hes I eb ety 2y 
TA re eR 
Tt ey ‘ e is if ei 





70 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS — 


To his friend Stefan he defends the value of 
the work of the young men: 


“Tt is in the season of youth that thought ferments. 
All really great ideas are born in youth. It is true that 
they emerge bewildered and contradictory, but to man- 
kind will accrue salvation from their fervor and their 
glorious impetus. True age is something that is not 
weary, but fresh—a period in which thought is quiet 
and clarified—and the fabric of the spirit complete.” 


His adventures among books are so many mar- 
velous discoveries. In August, 1910, this dy- 
namic mind encounters another—Nietzsche’s: 


“T have read ‘Zarathustra.’ I am dizzy, breathless, I 
stagger. I shall not say anything about this book—I 
cannot. One must be fortified with a rich stock of 
systematized scholarship, possibly of pedantry, not to be 
utterly destroyed by such a non plus ultra.” 


“Inexpressible books—these of Nietzsche and Van 
Gogh—plowshares that sever and tear us up by the 
roots.” 


In the spring of 1911 we find Otto in Florence, 
revelling in a great harvest of Italian art. From 
his fourteenth to his seventeenth year this eager- 
ness to absorb and master the world grew more 
and more intense. The boy’s soul and spirit ex- 
panded: he sat in rigorous judgment upon him- 





A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY 71 


self. There was something Spartan in the man- 
ner in which he disciplined his mind and kept 
it true to its search of the perfect thought in the 
perfect form. A deep, religious conviction of 
his predestined duties in life came upon him. 


On July 29, 1911: 


“T am slaving prodigiously. Before going co Florence 
I had time, but no ideas, no thoughts. But now I have 
thoughts and ideas, but no time. But I prefer this con- 
dition to the other. For ideas abide within one, are seiz- 
able, even though for the time being they may remain 
without being executed. But time lies without us—it 
may therefore be utilized but not preserved.” 


Again and again we find the lad plunging him- 
self into the world of Greek antiquity, as when 
he brilliantly debates the antitheses of the 
Pythagoreans with his friend Otto G. On a 
voyage homeward bound from Teneriffe in 
September, 1911, he studies More’s “Utopia’’: 


“A most extraordinary work! In the first book a 
knowledge of economic conditions is revealed, and a 
judgment upon these conditions, which seem almost in- 
credible. Utopias such as those of Bellamy vanish by 
comparison into the dusk of insignificance. The astute 
investigations as to the origin of theft are of particular 
excellence—he derives it from bad education, poverty, 
lack of food, high prices of raw materials. In the major 


72 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


part of ‘Utopia’ proper, one feels that despite all excel- 
lencies, there is much that is too rationalistic, and one is 
unpleasantly aware of the mechanistic state which has 
mere wraiths for its units and not real, live human 
being. 4 


The element of imaginative prevision cooled 
and controlled by common sense was conspicuous 
in him. It is upon this combination that the 
higher statesmanship is based, observes this polli- 
ticlan of fourteen, in comment upon an article 
in the Berliner Tageblatt which expressed the 
view that the Triple Alliance had outlived itself: 


“The conclusion that Germany and Austria are by 
themselves capable of resisting a combination of all 
European powers, seems to me to be an error. The 
argument that this was proved during the annexation of 
Bosnia, is insufficient, since the Powers did not feel in- 
clined to precipitate a world war merely on account of 
Bosnia. But I would like (or rather would not like) to 


see what Germany or Austria would do, if England 


should paralyze all maritime traffic, if Russia should 
send us no wheat, the Argentine and other countries no 
meat, in short, if all connections between us and the rest 
of the world should be suspended, as would surely 
come to pass in such a war, and not in a miniature affair 
such as that between Italy and Turkey.” 


He compiled a table of exports and imports 
to prove his point and forecast with remarkable 





1 








A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY 73 


precision the economic basis of the Revolution, 
the era of profiteering, etc. The young, intuitive 
mind was already conscious of voices crying from 
afar; it registered the brooding troubles of the 
epoch, felt the latent potencies of the world fever 
even then developing: 


“Surely we are living to-day in an age of transition, 
in a seeking, questing age, void of all authority, form- 
less, chaotic—yet a wonderful age; not wonderful, it is 
true, if contemplated as a fixed result from a fixed point 
of view, but wonderful, unutterably wonderful as some- 
thing hostile—something that extorts. I know of no 
period in which there are so many new doors to tear 
open, so much to fight for and about, to create, to destroy 
and demolish and then to up-build once more, as in this 
our very own period.” 


The muddle-headed politics of the rulers of 
Germany are clear to him, for after a clairvoyant 
analysis of Germany’s political situation (No- 
vember, 1911), he winds up: “Such are the re- 
sults of a dish-clout policy which now seems to 
have become a sacrosanct policy with us.” 

It was toward the close of 1911 that he flung 
himself heart and soul into a_philosophical- 
economical enterprise of great compass—“Tyr- 
anny and Democracy.” In spite of his inner 
tage and unrest, he is aware that it is well that 





74 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


one of his age is not forced to evolve too much 
out of himself: 


“It is a sign of weakness to do something merely out 
of reaction. Ah! To be able to carry a serene balance 
of stability and perfection in one’s soul! But it is 
terribly difficult to accept influences which are necessary 
and yet use them only as a means toward the end of 
shaping one’s own being from within, and not to keep 
on carrying these elements as foreign bodies in one’s 
system, however enthusiastically one may have accepted 
them at first.” 


Recorded in his diary in September, 1912: 


I believe 

More firmly and more imperturbably than any saint, 
I believe in my demon, 

I believe in my duties, 

I believe in my task! 


Poems pour from his pen, their excellence for 
the greater part eludes translation. The freedom 
and radiance of the pagan world wrings from him 
worship as in the glowing verses “To Aphro- 
dite” and in “Hippolyta”’: 


This is her body, that addresseth, 
Clinging, the wind’s course, yon and thither swaying, 
This is her body, that caresseth, 








A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY 75 


A birch tree, bending to the syrinx’ playing; 
And this her body, as it presseth 
Close to the charger, like an arrow, her will obeying. 


On January 26, 1913: 


“This forenoon I read two pamphlets on alcoholism 
—Gruber and Krdapelin’s and Forel’s. I am convinced 
that a physically degenerate age such as ours imposes 
duties upon us far beyond those of any other, so that 
the purely sociological aspect of the question forces one 
to abstinence, since only a small modicum of one’s life 
is lived for one’s own self. Were this otherwise, or 
did we live in a healthy age, I would certainly drink, 
since this has been done by all great men, and in all 
great epochs, and since the greatest poets have glorified 
it in song.” 


His nature was keenly responsive to the aes- 
thetic, and the world of art reacted upon him po- 
tently, productively. In March, 1913, the 
sixteen-year old boy writes to a friend: 


“I have recently occupied myself a great deal with 
the Renaissance, especially with its architecture... . In 
the closer, deeper contemplation of the splendors of a 
rhythmically codrdinated wall, a well-proportioned win- 
dow, new and unsurmised beauties arise before us. I also 
believe that architecture is essentially the masculine art 
and that its subordination in our age is a particularly 
clear sign of the effeminization of that age. I also find 






76 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


that the relation of logic in mathematics to the logic in 
_ architecture is of vast importance.” 





April 4, 1913: 


“T’ve been chasing for more than three hours through 
the woods with Mister [his dog]. ‘He is an expert at this 
business and, strange as it may seem, something almost 
bacchantic overcomes him at such times. There is a won- 
derful sense of happiness in observing animals and 
plants in their every detail—how a hare runs, a deer 
leaps, in short, to relate oneself in this way to the for- 
mative processes of nature—for even the mere visualiza- 
tion and realization of things is already one of the lower 
degrees of the creative.” 


a ee Se 


When he was sixteen Otto wrote a dramatic 
poem “Eros and Psyche,” based upon motifs of 
Apuleius. Despite its boyish purity and fresh- 
ness, it is full of a mature beauty and power and a 
serene assurance of form. He went to Italy once 
more, where he learned “that a Titan found a 
place in Michael Angelo’s breast, but a God in 
Leonardo’s.”” In his diary under date of March 
17, 1914, we find this note: 


“Read a lot of Protagoras. Great and deep things 
about great men. Yet often I despair of seizing it all. 
How many of us know the living meaning of these Greek 
terms? We translate everything into Christian termi- 
nology.” 









MU e el er 


A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY 77 


The war breaks out. On August 3, 1914, he 
writes to Julie Vogelstein, his mother’s friend: 


“Though all things may be veiled and dark, so that 
we cannot peer into the future, one thing is certain to 
me: Germany cannot perish. And this faith I base 
not—as is the habit of our braggarts—upon a belief in 
our perfections, nor yet upon our achievements, but 
wholly upon the conviction that as a nation we have not 
yet fulfilled ourselves. This it is which gives me such 
assurance. ‘That Germany which we carry in our hearts 
has not yet taken shape or form. It is possible that in 
music we may already have sung ourselves out, but in 
the realms of poetry and architecture and above all in 
the formation of Life, we have not yet fulfilled our task 
or destiny. The task that has been imposed upon us is 
dificult—more difficult than that which confronts other 
peoples—because we are more diversified and more mani- 
fold than they.” 


The same day he reported himself as a volun- 
teer, but was told that no more were being ac- 
cepted. On August 4, he went to Berlin with his 
father. They visited the Reichstag. “The 
Chancellor,’ he writes, “looked almost tragic.” 
On August 21st, the birthday of his soldier grand- 
father, he went to the family vault in the Hasen- 
heide with a great wreath and offered up a 
prayer: 






78 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Since in thy footsteps, forefather, I fare, 
Thine eyes be on me and in me thy spirit; 
Thy strength be mine in battle, such my prayer: 
Bend down to me that this I may inherit. 


In September, 1914, Otto Braun, then seven- 
teen years old, departed for the war, “‘in all hope 
and expectation—not in a spirit of adventure nor 
in search of new sensations or new experiences— 
but rather in the hope and fixed faith that my 
being will be subdued and made man-like, and 
that form and content, power and proportion, 
strength and beauty may come to me in order that 
I may be prepared for that unconjectured life © 
which will open up before me later on.” 

The influence of Field Marshal Mackensen, 
who had been the adjutant of his maternal grand- 
father, had been enlisted, and through him young 
Otto had been entered in the 4th Regiment of 
Jagers for a course of training at Graudenz. 
He became immensely popular with his comrades, 
though among his superior officers there were a 
few martinets who hated him because of the So- 
cialistic faith of his parents and the favor he en- 
joyed in Mackensen’s eyes. His letters are full 
of enthusiasm over the soldier’s life, the bluff 
camaraderie, the life with common men and 
horses, the wild rides across countryside. De- 








tia 
WAGES n bk a oe 





\ 


| oe beat ayaa Mea 


A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY 79 


cember, 1914, finds him in Poland. He is at 
once flung into the dirt and primitiveness of the 
front; he writes letters “crouching in foul barns 
by the light of candles, whilst the guns bellow 
and a comrade at my side is searching his dog for 
fleas.” 

On January 17 he writes to his parents: 


“This is the fabulous thing about war-time: it is not 
only in feeling and in spirit that the simple, the primitive 
and the elemental hold sway—no, it is in all things, down 
to the most minute. Only now do we realize what house 
and home really mean, and all the dear, familiar 
objects of daily use or necessity, real necessity. We see 
to our amazement, as for the first time, the parts of 
which they are composed when stripped of all ephemeral 
decoration. This is borne in upon us now—when we are 
forced to make them for ourselves.” 


He is eager for action, however, and also anx- 
ious to escape from the domineering of the marti- 
nets. He asks, therefore, to be transferred to 
the foremost lines—a resolution which not even 
the pleas of his parents can alter. As a prelimi- 
nary step he is removed, again through the influ- 
ence of Mackensen, to a cavalry corps at Lodz. 
The frontispiece of the book shows the great bra- 
zen helmet of the curassier or guard, incongru- 
ously gleaming above the smooth and gravely 






80 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


girlish face and the gold-broidered uniform—like 
‘some mad medley, some incongruous juxtaposi- 
tion of the primitive warlike and the spiritual 
cultured. His letters from the field assume a 
new and deeper note; questions of history, poli- 
tics, literature occupy him even in the midst of 
all the turmoil, excitement and fatigue. He de- 
vours book after book. A beautiful poem, full 
of adoration, goes to his mother on her fiftieth 
birthday. In July, 1915, he writes to his 
parents: 


“I must tell you this. My youth was so splendid and 
so spacious that I am certain few others could boast of 
anything resembling it. This I owe to you both. And 
yet had it not been for this soldier’s life, often so hard 
and grim, my youth might have spoiled my life,—for it 


was too pure, too good, too immune from all ugly things 


and from contact with the great masses. Now I believe 
the balance is restored.” 


There are countless indications in the literary 
remains of this young genius which prove clearly 
that he would have become a great and construc- 
tive force in the New Germany, a force that 
would have impressed its will upon the age. 
Like a finger pointing out the destiny of America 
are these words, clear and noble, outweighing all 
the moralistic shams and sophistries with which 


| 
: 
4 
. 
d 
| 








A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY 81 


intellectual and political thimble-riggers have be- 
wildered the world: 


“We do not know when peace will come, but some 
day it will surely come, and then the future will belong, 
not to the victorious or defeated nations, but to that land 
which will be able to mold peace to its most consummate 
form, that land which will remain victor in the battle of 
peace.” 


He is disgusted with the spirit of shallow re- 
ligiosity which is making itself felt among the 
people at home—he regards it as death to the 
fecundation of the vast and creative future. The 
world of the trenches swallows him. It is not 
long before he is made lieutenant. His men 
adore him, recognizing in him a great spirit, a 
leader born and bred. He shares all their pri- 
vations, their joys and sorrows, refusing all 
special privileges. 

It was only after Otto’s death that the follow- 
ing impressive incident came to light through the 
account of a comrade of his. One night when 
they were in the trenches near Bolimov-Borczy- 
mov, there came an order for Lieutenant Braun 
to take a dozen men and bury the dead in No 
Man’s Land, after first removing the identifica- 
tion disks. ‘The Russian patrols were every- 





82 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


where. The dead had lain there for weeks, and 
_ advanced putrefaction had set in. The men 
were sickened to their gorges and almost fainted 
over the horrible task. Otto tried to cheer and 
encourage them, but to no avail. Then he 
erected himself to his full height and said, sol- 
emnly: “Men! If your minds won’t get the 
best of the decay, the decay will get the best 
of your minds!” And suddenly he began to 
chant lines from the Iliad in the original Greek. 
The sonorous verses, ringing through the night, 
made a wonderful impression on the soldiers, 
who worked silently and without faltering as 
though bound by some heroic spell. Then Otto 
spoke several of Hélderlin’s majestic hymns. A 
blasé lieutenant remarked: ‘“’Tisn’t many of 
the dead who get a requiem like that!” 

His best friend, Lieutenant Boye, is killed be- 
fore his eyes. He describes the most terrible 
things with the objectivity and detachment of the 
trained observer, the master Dichter. On August 
7, 1916, a telegram summons him home to 
Zehlendorf-Berlin—his mother is ill. He ar- 
rives only to hear that she has just died. “She 
lay there in august majesty,” he writes, “beauti- 
ful and serene as Demeter, the Queen of Earth 
whom she so loved. I do not know what I shall 





‘A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY = 83 


do—my life is utterly changed—demolished, 
foredone.” 

Almost at the same time news arrives that his 
friend and substitute, Lieutenant Brennfleck, has 
been killed during his absence. Returning to the 
front after his mother’s funeral, a third blow 
falls upon him—the tidings of the assassination 
of the reactionary Austrian Premier Stirgkh by 
his cousin Fritz Adler, the Socialist idealist— 
“the only man in apparently rotten Austria,” he 
remarks coldly in his journal, “with enough 
courage to sacrifice himself.” 

On November 11, 1916, he writes breezily 
from the War Hospital at Lemberg, and describes 
how he was wounded—“a bullet in the left fore- 
arm and one above the jaw, emerging close under 
the eye.” He now plunges into the military 
treatises of von Schlieffen, Gneisenau, Clause- 
witz, and the histories of von Treitschke—tem- 
pered by the Greek poets and many modern writ- 
ers. His enlightened patriotism does not pre- 
vent him from making an acute criticism of va- 
rious German shortcomings. He comments on 
the lack of understanding shown by Treitschke 
for certain unpleasant features of the Prussian 
nature, features by no means rooted in the su- 
perficial. ‘How does it happen that again and 





84 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


again we are not only misunderstood, but abso- 


_ lutely hated, and that our most benevolent critics 
are full of despair after colliding with our edges 
and corners. We lack the sovereign control of 
form, something which only an ancient Kultur 
can give.” A long and poignant poem in mem- 
ory of his mother goes to his father from a lazaret 
at Trebnitz to which he has been removed. The 
poem is in three parts—‘‘Solace,” ‘“‘Adoration,” 
and “The Pledge.” Of the last I have essayed 
the following translation: 


We are alone, my father, and the hours 
Of morning and of evening bring us sadness: 
Terrible are men’s steps and their loud gladness, 
And faded seems the scent of freshest flowers. 


Yet we are here, pent in our bodies drifting, 
She who is now ours wholly, for her sake 
A sacrificial vow to Heaven lifting 

That sorrow shall but steel us and not break. 


Hers the recurrent victory, daily sure, 
Her spirit stay with us victorious still: 
Though many a decade press upon thy will— 
Father, have faith! helping, I will endure! 


A long leave of absence is given him to recover 
from the wounds and the attendant complica- 
tions. This period he spends at the family home 





A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY — 85 


at Zehlendorf, at Munich, in the Tyrol, and at 
Copenhagen. With the superb assurance of one 
who knows his path, his goal and his powers, he 
writes, in August, 1917: 


“This morning First Lieutenant W. told us of R.’s 
praise of me. These eulogies always arouse a certain 
distrust in me—a sense of shame. I shall not live out- 
wardly, though I shall live for the world, but not 
individually sealed and stoppered up. I shall always 
bear within me an unpolluted spirit and a god whom 
few know, but who after I am gone, will shine the 
brighter. I shall have many enemies and experience 
many attacks during life, but after my death I shall be 
a symbol and a monument to men—one yin will be a 
beginning—one who will have progeny.” 


Sleepless nights befall him, dreaming of, 
planning out a great work in three volumes to 
be called “The State.”’ The first volume is to be 
devoted to ““The History of the Theory of State”’ ; 
the second, ““The History of State Forms to the 
Beginning of the 19th Century”; the third, “The 
Development of States During the 19th Century, 
Their Present Forms and the Necessity of New 
Forms.” National economy lures him—he sees 
in it a realm full of grand and fruitful tasks. 

During November, 1917, a neurosis of the 
heart is diagnosed in Otto Braun, and he is or- 





86 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


dered to the mountains, deeply depressed because 
the cannot return to the front. Once more he 
revels in the beauty of the world. Writing from 
Neubeuern: 


“This was an indescribably beautiful day. Every- 
where in the valleys floated the remnants of flaming 
clouds, across which the sun performed veritable baccha- 
nals of light. The heavens, on the contrary, were 
absolutely clear, the woods full of color and rustling 
sounds and the peaks a glittering white.” 


At Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps, during a 
trip on skis: 


“One thing has now become clear to me. The su- 
preme goal which man is able to achieve in life is not 
fame, not happiness, not even greatness ; no! not even that 
which up to now has appeared to me as the greatest of 
all things—the Great Achievement. It is none of these 
but this, only this: to become a prototype, a model— 
one, that through its destiny alone determines the world 
and humanity.” 


THE SUPERNAL SERVICE 


This be thy law—some god shalt thou surrender 
Thyself and serve him all thy days, 

Thy formless life a form to render 
He plucks it from its transient ways. 





A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY = 87 


Think not thou canst with passionate crying, 
Or with a wailing song, persuade 

From his pure temple steps replying, 
Him to descend, thy pangs to aid. 


His office is not to attend thee 
As doth a mother, simple, wise, 

Nor stay the rock that falls to rend thee, 
O fragile one, before his eyes. 


Yet hast thou courage, in thyself believing, 
No bitter disillusion shalt thou fear: 

Labor shalt thou and grow, at last perceiving 
The perfect Wonder—when thy god is Here. 


In January, 1918, there is a note in his diary, 
expressing his joy that he has once more been de- 
clared fit for service at the front. He is sent 
first to the Italian front—the impressions received 
there result in wonderful letters and records in 
his journal. He is then transferred to the West 
Front to take part in what proved to be the last 
tremendous offensive of the German armies— 
which began in March, 1918. ‘Yet even amidst 
this wild and murderous hurly-burly and forward 
rush, he finds time to read deep and wise books, 
to think and to set down his thoughts. As, for 
example, on April 6, 1918: 





88 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


“This military training is a damned good one for us. 
And yet I feel that life has many a hard knock in store 
for me—otherwise nature would never have given me 
so much inner power to repel all unpleasant things.” 


Soon afterward he is advanced in the service, 
attached to one of the staffs, a promotion which 
does not please him. From his camp at Hallan- 
court he describes his sensations on beholding the 
havoc wrought in San Quentin by the bombard- 
ments of the Allies: 


“Never have I seen desolation so stark and thorough 
as in the villages in front of our lines. Terribly the 
cathedral of St. Quentin stretches its shattered head 
aloft, high above mountains of ruins. From within the 
skies peer through the roof—the wreckage of which 
cumbers the floor—solitary buttresses and pillars of the 
groined vaults lift their pitiful stumps into the air. 
The fragments of glorious rose windows, the splinters 
of panes iridescent with color, hang here and there. It 
is thrice grotesque to see here, where only the eternal 
seems fit to survive, and where even this seems doomed 
to perish, the crude, screaming modern frescoing of the 
choir, a symbol of the new barbarism. The ridiculous 
painted heavens with their gilded stars still blink down 
upon one in odd sections, whilst behind them and above 
them the real heavens bend blue and solemnly over the 
wreckage of beautifully curving vaults.” 


His last letter was written to Julie Vogelstein, 





~ 1” Se el ee . 


A CANDIDATE FOR IMMORTALITY = 89 


at Zehlendorf, from a deep, reinforced cellar at 
Marcelcave in Northeast France, and closes thus 
—as with a vision or an apotheosis of a spirit 
that had reached its fruition?—or of one that 
stood upon the threshold? 


“IT am now once more overcome by that very same 
feeling which possessed me when I last left for the front. 
It is a feeling as if a great impending change were await- 
ing me and it is upon me now. It is beautiful—the 
future is absolutely impenetrable, yet it furnishes a 
background upon which one can paint all manner of 
radiant colors and magic landscapes.” 


On the morning of April 29, 1918, a shell, 
falling into the cellar at Marcelcave, ended the 
life of Otto Braun in his twentieth year. 





TV 
THE MACHINE AS SLAVE AND MASTER 


Some day when the fever of our civilization 
will have burned itself out like a superheated 
furnace, some clear-eyed Ironist will write the 
philosophical and social history of the Machine. 
With the imperturbability of his own theme and 
yet with a glow of pity at his heart, he will 
trace the curve of its ever-growing power over 
the human animal and its destinies. 

Intersecting the vertical lines of his chart, he 
will mark it sweeping and darting upward in 
jagged and precipitous spurts during the last two 
centuries—a black lightning streak, or the sky- 
line of a mountain range upon which humanity, 
like Prometheus, lies helpless in chains and ex- 
posed—how nakedly, nakedly !—to itself. 

At the lowest end of this grim line we find 
the stone hatchet and the fire-drill of the primi- 
tives; at the uppermost end, salient like some 
iron tentacle or Tartarean creeper, the compli- 


cated enginery of our day, the highly organized 
90 





THE MACHINE AS SLAVE AND MASTER  g1 


mechanical monsters, productive and destructive, 
born of our ingenuity and our greed. 

Here we see mathematical formule and subtle 
problems in physics and mechanics working them- 
selves out in steel, animated by steam or elec- 
tricity. 

The laws of dynamics are translated into 
cunning contrivances before our eyes. 

With something of the horror that is born of 
such mystery, we behold the inorganic with its 
monotonous mimicry of life swamping life itself. 

The world before the war was glutted and 
choked with the rivers of textiles and papyri that 
streamed from the mechanical loom, the paper- 
machine and the rotary press. 

The tides of industrial production flowed 
round the world in thick and turgid streams, 
laden with the spawn and offal of the Machine. 
These cluttered up the cities, the shops, the homes 
of men with cheap and usually ugly things, soul- 
less and dehumanized, and of no interest beyond 
their brief usefulness. 

Then, as inevitably foreordained in the strife 
of the commercial age, came one more puissant 
than the Machine and its mass production. 

This was the grimmest monster of all, a 
Minotaur among Minotaurs. 





92 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


It was the great Reducer-to-the-Absurd—the 
' mortar in which a trumpery civilization was well- 
nigh brayed to dust and ashes. 

Tnis Thing spoke as a volcano speaks, in a 
bloom of rose-red flame and thunder, as it 
squatted upon its haunches in a market-square 
and was served by high priests in frock coats. 

The great siege Howitzer sat among the flower- 
beds in the Place at Louvain, and spat forth in 
a beautiful trajectory a huge hulk of steel which 
crushed and blasted the steel cupolas and pon- 
derous walls of Fort Loncin and its sisters. It 
seemed for a time the apotheosis of the Mechanis- 
tic Age bent upon self-destruction. 

But this stabile and monumental brute was to 
be outdone by another. Soon there came a gi- 
gantic fire-belching turtle of riveted armor-plate 
with men in its belly lumbering across the desert 
which the science of ballistics had wrought in the 
heart of Europe. 

The Mechanistic Age was full of wonder at its 
own ingenuity and sang litanies to the inventor 
of the Tank. 

Then the obedient slave machines stood still or 
rose up and rebelled like so many Sparticides. 

Out of the plethoras they had so patiently . 
brought forth there grew a sudden dearth. They 





THE MACHINE AS SLAVE AND MASTER 93 


left us in the lurch amidst a want of paper, of 
woven wares, of many things the modern ma- 
terialist feels are necessary for existence. 

If machines could laugh of themselves the 
rhythm of their iron joy would run over the world 
like a wave. 

Up to the hour of the World War the Machine 
had been Baal and Mammon. 

Then—clanking, rumbling, whirring out of se- 
cret arsenals and hangars—it suddenly revealed 
itself as Moloch. 

The dragons of the Prime had come again and 
felt snugly at home in a new primeval world of 
stewing swamp and slime, of rotted corpses and 
shell-blasted ground soil. 

The Machine, which had been a vampire in the 
social state, draining lives and converting them 
into wares under its masters, now became a can- 
nibal, devouring human bodies and human works 
—and its own progeny. 

Before the war we were too blind to see that 
the Thing we had built to serve us had become a 
Dictator. 

The Machine, usurping power, had established 
its own values and negatived those of man. 

_ What is it that to-day confounds and swallows 
us up? Society in disintegration? 





94 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


The proletariat hounded on to self-immolation 
in the wars, fed with visions of a new dispensa- 
tion, and at last awakened to consciousness of 
its own power? 

A world famished amidst a rich and productive 
world? 

All these, no doubt, but primarily this: the 
chaos produced by the collapse of the great inter- 
national machine or organization—the conse- 
quence and the curse of a machine-made civili- 
zation—the whole world, and man and life itself 
as a machine! 

But the dumb enginery of the world is itself 
in confusion worse confounded. 

It is sick, and invalid, broken, scrapped, 
sweated like a slum seamstress. 

It is starved for want of food, coal and petrol 
and oil. 

Men, having surrendered the cunning of their 
hands to the machine and flung the handicrafts 
to the lost arts, are now more helpless than ever— 
the victims of the mechanical saprophytes which 
they had bred to such gigantic dimensions in the 
jungle of industrialism. 

To save civilization and culture from the cult 
of the machine in the first task of culture and 
civilization. 








OUT tee cer fe Pe Pe ee 
Sgt Pe a gs 


THE MACHINE AS SLAVE AND MASTER 95 


The machine is sick, but not moribund. It is 
gaining its second wind; lowering, it is preparing 
a new tempo and momentum during this pause 
of lassitude and exhaustion on the part of its 
masters. 

Already the upper end of the sinister curve of 
mechanistic development sways backward and 
forward, porrected like the head of a snake. 

The machine aspires. Its will to evolution 
sweeps and shoots far beyond the evolution of 
man, the creature transcends the creator. 

Behemoth has conquered the earth and the 
bowels of the earth, his brother Leviathan the 
sea and the deeps of the sea. And now the 
Machine has taken to itself wings, has become a 
pterodactyl. 

The tempo of our lives is no longer attuned to 
whirling wheels, but to flying missiles and pro- 
jectiles. 

Time is lashed furiously through the calendar, 
distance is destroyed; the planet shrinks. 

The Machine cheated us with the lure of 
flight. It converted itself into a bird, without 
giving us the freedom or the refuge or the serenity 
of the bird. 

It seems strange that the land where civiliza- 
tion is often synonymous with a grandiose empery 





96 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


of mechanics, has so far produced no poet nor 
philosopher nor imaginative draftsman of the 
Machine. But this is perhaps natural, since the 
Machine in America—the commercial, the politi- 
cal and financial Machine as well as the material 
Machine—drains the blood and the marrow from 
art and the imagination. 

In England we have had Kipling’s personifi- 
cations of liners, locomotives and dynamos, and 
the ingenious mechanical drolleries of W. Heath 
Robinson. Marinetti, the Futurist, deified and 
demonized the mechanical. That weird German 
genius, Alfred Kubin, has revealed in his etchings 
the malevolence and sinister will of the machine, 
as he has of houses. The grotesque “Puffing 
Billys’ and antediluvian steamboats of Lyonel 
Feininger, the gifted expressionist, an American 
by birth, who is now one of the leaders of the 
revolutionized Art Academy, the Staatliche Bau- 
haus at Weimar, might have come out of Laputa. 

Out of art-impregnated Bavaria in which the 
esthetic impulse still glows amidst agrarianism 
and the wave of industrialism sent southward by 
the Krupps during the war, comes a new and 
amazing interpreter of the soul and body of the 
Machine. 


-* 





THE MACHINE AS SLAVE AND MASTER 97 


In ten superb lithographic plates dedicated to 
the gifted inventor of the gyroscope, Dr. 
Anschitz-Kaempf, Otto Muck has created a 
litany to modern technics. 

Muck’s interpretation is largely a benevolent 
one. Peering behind and beneath the industrial 
significance and function of the Machine, Muck 
beholds it as an entity independent of volition, 
yet actuated by the desire to serve man. 

With remarkable clairvoyance this artist has 
seized upon the soul and essence of the Machine, 
coaxed it out of the inanimate and invested it 
with something mystic and monumental. 

The weird and unfathomable in the nature of 
automata is here translated into terms of the 
semi-human or the animalistic. 

These things of iron, steel and steam become 
genll, awe-inspiring, though obedient to a higher 
will. They are utilitarian Frankensteins, under 
the spell of inexorable service—the iron grails in 
which nature’s forces play and seethe for our 
benefit. 

Yet despite their benevolent purpose, there 
clings to them something of the strangeness, of 
the eternal alienation of the inorganic to which 
we ourselves have given a mock life—creations 


Bis kr YS i a. 55 
= ce et joe Koes fey ck eee 
: hs 





98 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


bred in the shadows between animate and inan- 
imate. 

A new dimensional world unfolds itself, a 
heavy and clanking phantasy takes form upon the 
lithographic stone. 

Muck has not built nor assembled machines in 
his drawings. 

The technician will miss the orthodoxy of con- 
struction. But the artist has intuitively wrought 
in terms of mechanics and striven to express his 
contrivances in terms of the symbolic and the 
individual. 

The first plate is entitled ‘““The Locomotive.” 
It is a drawing of immense sweep and power, 
atmospherically akin to Turner’s “Rain, Steam 
and Speed.” 

A bullet-headed centaur with clenched fists 
and glistening as with oil, storms along the rails 
on hoofs of iron—behind him a smoke and 
whirlwind-stricken sky and the black bulks of the 
cars, thundering. 

“The Traveling Crane” crouches upon its 
overhead rails against the glass rectangles of a 
factory roof. It is conceived as a kind of 
fantastic cat with hanging prehensile forelegs 
and claws, its tail the electric cable that feeds 
it with power. 





THE MACHINE AS SLAVE AND MASTER 99 


“The Harbor Derricks” are rooted fast in 
stolid rows along the quay, like grim, bald titans 
in riveted cuirasses, with enormous baboon-like 
arms and hook-like hands. With ease and a 
clockwork-like grandezza they lift huge bales and 
cases out of the belly of a squat steamer alongside. 

A remarkable mixture of the mechanical and 
the demoniacal is ‘The Dredger Chain.” 
Stretched in rigid tension in mid-air, the joints 
of the chain resolve themselves into the inter- 
locked arms and legs of naked slave creatures; 
their distended planished abdomens into the 
buckets. There is a strange Japanese air of 
demonry about this drawing, an optical be- 
witchment. 

“The Steam Hammers,” with their crouching, 
half-human shapes and upraised massy fists, 
stricken into a terrible rigidity upon their iron 
plinths, must be regarded as a failure in concep- 
tion and execution. ‘There is here no cunning 
amalgamation of the two worlds. 

“The Hydraulic Press,” with its wet, muscle- 
swelling ogre squatting upon and pulling down 
the top plate of the press, with water gage and 
supply pipe inharmoniously obtrusive, is another 
forced solution, a violent and repulsive juncture 
of flesh and iron. 





100 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


“The Centrifugal Turbine” perches upon its 
- vertical axle, like an Indian god—the fans are 
the multiple outstretched hands of the figure, 
whirling feverishly as upon a throne or altar. 
Here, too, the Machine refused to be coerced by 
the artist and the result is abortive. 

The ignition or “Explosion Motor’? must be 
regarded as the dynamic heart of the modern 
machine, the arcanum of compressed power. 
Muck depicts a five-cylindered engine as a row of 
rigid figures, low-browed, bullet-necked brutes, 
their torsos kneaded into a mass of distended 
muscles and sinews, with smooth, tube-like ab- 
domens and legs starkly fixed, all of them shaken 
by the pother and turmoil within, and tense to 
the point of eruption. This drawing rushes and 
quivers with suppressed energies; we seem to 
hear the panting of the tormented demons of 
speed. 

A pig-like monster with a bloated, globular 
body leans forward upon iron-toggled knees, 
hideous, bestial, infernal. From the rounded 
mouth of his steel sac, as from some neo-Gothic 
gargoyle, vomits a smooth torrent of incandescent 
metal whose reflexes play upon his blunt snout 
and basilisk eyes. The Bessemer retort! 

The last plate of the cycle is a sombre votive 











THE MACHINE AS SLAVE AND MASTER 101 


offering at the black altars of the Age of Steel. 

A smoke-blasted firmament is projected over 
us like an iron casque or prison vault. In the 
foreground upon a flat plinth, a cyclopean mon- 
ster, half mammoth, half oven on formidable, 
pillar-like legs, uprears against the murk. From 
its small, evil top, or open throat, it belches up 
whorl after whorl of smoke, thick as lava or the 
coils of pythons, writhing in the glare from 
the inferno in its bowels. Behind this brute in 
ominous array stand its fellows, snorting and 
glowing with a portentous life. Blast furnaces! 

Here, uplifted out of the welter of gesticulat- 
ing, twisting, turning, dipping, spewing, lifting, 
dancing and performing automata, like a cathe- 
dral over cottages, we stand face to face with the 
begetter of them all, the Moloch of the Material- 
istic and Mechanistic Age. 

Over this tremendous vision of gloom and 
force and fire, there hovers, like the glow of the 
blast furnace itself, a tragic intimation of the 
doom to come. 

We see grimly foreshadowed a world armored 
in steel, of nations rigid and bristling with 
gleaming armaments, of the seas enslaved by 
bulks and sharks of iron, of the airs obscured by 
mechanical condors, of a race of troglodytes 


bel w satan win CO y vc) ok ets aw Ar = 





102 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


weighed down with the chains of an ever-growing 
- industrialism. 

It is this sinister element which abides even in 
the productive or creative machine, which un- 
masks itself in this final plate of Otto Muck’s and 
flares like a red flag of warning. 

The Machine is more and more, man less and 
less. The latest menace to descend upon us is 
the high-speed currency-note press, raving with- 
out pause day and night in the national printing 
vault of every capital. 

This cruel Machine mocks at and annihilates 
the very wealth its brothers had helped to 
produce. 

The economics of the world are choked in 
snowstorms of paper, like mourners at a Chinese 
funeral. 

After the red Saturnalia of blood and bullets, 
comes this Carnival with its cheerless showers of 
drab confetti, this mock-money that turns to dust 
and ashes in our grasp. 

The tragic circle of human folly and insanity 
joins up and ends the war as it began it—with a 
“scrap of paper.” 

Is it the autumn of our civilization, as Oswald 
Spengler declares in his dark but fascinating 
work, “The Downfall of the Occident”’ ? 





THE MACHINE AS SLAVE AND MASTER 103 


Are these oblongs of soiled paper the first 
driven leaves of this Fall of our Downfall? 

In his growing sterility of soul, his worship of 
foul and false gods, his suicidal manias and his 
atavistic wars, the Human Being is left almost 
helpless to the menace of the Machine. 

For the thing has learned to reproduce not 
only itself, but other Machines. The Machine, 
once the creation of man’s hand, will increase 
and multiply by the magic and magnetic life that 
seems inherent in it. Unless the civilization to 
come effect the reconquest and the reénslavement 
of the Machine, a world of helots will sink into 
deeper and ever deeper bondage unto the very 
devices which it had invented to make it free. 





V 
THE “ABSOLUTE” POEM 


To find one’s way through the art of German 
Expressionism is like wandering with whirling 
brain under the livid glass firmament of some 
huge conservatory and attempting to label 
outrageous orchids; or adventuring through some 
vast machinery hall with a thousand models 
working and stamping bewilderingly. In this 
exuberant art, we encounter an individualism no 
longer arrayed in groups or schools, but cloven 
sharp and sheer, isolated like so many islands, so 
many peaks. The encompassing medium, like 
the sea or the air, is all that artists have in 
common—the concept of the expressionistic. 
We collide here with the eternal protestant, with 
Luthers in art, ideologues, hard-bitten idealists, 
each—with defiance like a dagger between his 
teeth—proudly climbing his own Golgotha, Pis- 
gah or Olympus. Some of them are figures of im- 
pressive proportions, some of them destined for 
the heroic: Jaeckel, Waske, Krauskopf, Heck- 


104 





THE “ABSOLUTE” POEM 105 


endorf, Pechstein, Meltzer, César Klein, Scharff, 
Kokoschka, Rohlfs, Schmidt-Rottloff, Heckel, 
Kirchner, and others—all painters. If they 
have not achieved liberation for art, they have 
achieved it, each in his own way, for the artist, 
each for himself. Their works are published in 
large and beautiful portfolios at enormous prices, 
in limited editions, and are usually over- 
subscribed. 

The antithesis between Impressionism and 
Expressionism is not always clear. The Expres- 
sionist says: “I will not let the outer world 
impinge upon me and use me as a recording or 
interpreting instrument. J am the recorder, the 
interpreter of my own inner feelings, thoughts, 
moods and emotions; and these I express directly, 
abstractly, free of the thraldom of the object, 
unburdened by the material, the thing, or the 
image of the thing. I paint the thing, as I paint 
man, from within: [ interpret the soul.” The 
Impressionist claims also to interpret the soul. 
There remain, perhaps, in the last analysis, only 
the greater intensity and immediacy of Expres- 
sionism and the abstraction and ultimate simpli- 
fication of its terms and media. Objectless art. 

Boring and blasting persistently into the cliff 
of petrified form in every art, German Exores- 


» 


106 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


stonismus has struck a new vein. Gushes forth, 
naked of all message or meaning, the wellspring 
of the “absolute” poem. So far, there is but one 
example of this. It is called ““Ango Laina,” and 
is the work of Rudolf Blimner. 

Bliimner is one of the leading forces in the 
movement, or rather the institution of the 
“Sturm” at Berlin; for institution it has become 
under the energetic directorship of Herwarth 
Walden. Before his fiery conversion to Expres- 
sionism, Bliimner was a well-known actor and 
reciter of the intellectual school. Since then, he 
has become the dynamic interpreter and champion 
of expressionistic art—an uncompromising, im- 
pregnable champion, fortified with a plangent 
voice that is like a tocsin, a torrential pen for- 
ever on the offensive, and a face gouged hollow 
and burned out with the intensity of his esthetic 
fanaticism. 


“For years,” he declares, “I have contented myself 
with establishing the absolute dramatic or recitative 
speech, even in connection with the word. I have often 
declared that, to the creative actor, the words of a poem 
or a play (Dichtung) must prove an obstacle; whilst for 
the uncreative actor they provide an auxiliary means to 
the formation of tone. The best actors, to be sure, com- 
mand their own melodies, but only upon the basis of 





words and sentences and only when these have a mean- 
ing. Our actors enact a meaning. And we give them 
praise when they enact not merely the meaning of the 
words, but of the whole. Deprive them of the basis of 
this meaning and they become dumb, uncreative. 

“My own efforts to render an independent creative 
melody were either doomed to remain futile so long as I 
confined myself to non-expressionistic poetry, or to lead 
to a cleavage between my rhythmetized melody and the 
usually unrhythmic or, at best, metric phases of these 
earlier poems. It is only expressionistic poetry—that 
is, the conceptually a-logical but esthetically logical 
combination of words which rendered possible a lingual- 
melodic rhythmetization, leading to a unity.” 


But expressionistic poetry was still fettered to 
the word, and every word dragged in its wake a 
tangled network of fixed or implied meaning, as 
these lines by Johannes Becher: 


The bathing-master bleats . . . Now lust arbors 
Down from hill to sea. JRuin-land. 

Moon in cypresses spanned high. 
Quicksilvergleams on skullcoasts ivory. 


Or in the still more attenuated, skelétonized 
verse of Kurt Liebmann: 


Thy hair fluffs smiles 
breath velvet 
Thou 





108 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS > 


kissest at longings silver-threads 
claw-stark plaint 

to waving light 

and 

curling 

circling 

bluest 

sigh. 


It was Bliimner’s ambition to compose words 
or sounds, vowels or consonants, as a painter uses 
colors or a composer tones. As the fruit of his 
theories we have “Ango Laina,” an absolute 
poem, in two voices. The poem is written not 
for the eye, but rather for the ear, the inner ear. 
Rendered to the outer ear with all the countless 
gradations of Bltimner’s sonorous voice, this 
absolute poem takes on a tremendous volume, and 
palpitates with a strange power, music, and inner 
meaning. You are to read the words or concre- 
tions of letters as you would read notes. Even 
at the risk of disrupting the continuity, I shall 
quote only a few staves: 


Oiai laéla oia ssisialu 

Ensidio trésa sidio mischnumi 
Ia lon stuaz 

Brorr schjatt 

Oiazo tsuigulu 





ca er OL FE Aue ie il 7.2 
a i Sota es a Pe I 


THE “ABSOLUTE” POEM 109 


Ua sésa masuo tila 
Ua sésa maschiaté toréd 
Oi séngu gadse andola 
Oi ando séngu 

Séngu andola 

Oi séngu 

Gadse 

Ina 

Leiola 

Kba6é 

Sagor 

Kado 


Kad6 mai titsi 
Suijo angola 


Schu mai sita ka lio séngu 


Ia péndo ala 
Péndu siolo 


Toro toré 
Mengadse gadse se 


The cadences fall in a hissing, clattering, 
rolling liquid stream, then flow in a rhythmic 
buoyancy. A certain form is audible, a refrain, 
leaps forth again and again. But to the unex- 
pressionistic human ear it might be Hungarian, or 
Lettish, Esperanto, Ido—or idiocy. 

In this attempt to make poetry a pure abstrac- 


BEEN eek sca) 2 


110 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


tion, to lop from its burning quatrefoil of sound, 
sense, color, and form, all leaves except sound, 
Bliimner believes that he has given it an ethereal 
freedom, liberated it from the earthen investiture 
of elements too material or too human. He be- 
lieves that he has found a vehicle for the expres- 
sion of the immediate, direct, spontaneous lan- 
guage of the emotions, without the mediation of 
meaning or the background of association. He 
has, perhaps, builded better than he knew, but he 
has builded in a circle—backward and down- 
ward. For there where formal, conscious art 
leaves off, the borders of the primitive begin. 
The anarchs are at us from every side. We 
brush against all the aboriginal spectres that 
move behind the mysteries of speech, the dark 
and lurking half-bestial, half-devilish ancestors 
of words, crawling out of the instincts, out of 
inarticulate sounds, until they take wings and 
soar into the speech of Homer, Dante, Shake- 
speare and Goethe. 

In other words, Bliimner has reduced an art to 
a natural function; for until his absolute, abstract 
poetry be subjected, like music, to definite laws, 
it is little more than nature. Who among us 
with thrilling vocal chords and emotions taut as 
bowstrings in our youth, our boyhood or child- 





cee 2 : * 5 


THE “ABSOLUTE” POEM lil 


hood, has not yielded to the natural captivation 
of sound as a vent for emotion, and chanted such 
abstract poetry, coining a thousand new words 
and sounds, speaking a tongue never heard on 
land or sea, yet nevertheless a natural, human, 
universal tongue, dictated by the mysterious trin- 
ity and affinity between the ear, the heart and 
the tongue? 

In Rudolf Bliimner’s absolute poetry we are, 
therefore, still bound to the hints and signifi- 
cances of sound, if not of words—words that 
burst rocket-like into a luminous spray of a 
thousand associations. There is scarcely one of 
these artificial words that can not be given its 
onomatopeeic color or meaning. What does 
ango suggest?—what lainaf—what toré? The 
syllables stir the pools of memory or association, 
even to those who are confined to the pool of 
a single language—they stir even the language 
puddles of the uncultured with their vocabula- 
ries of five hundred well-worn words. And why 
should most of these arbitrary words of Bliimner’s 
end mellifluously with vowels, if not because of 
the traditional music of italianate vocables? 

Thus, every poem in an unknown, exotic lan- 
guage would be absolute poetry to us. Perhaps 
it 7s, perhaps it must be, by virtue of that mystic 


112 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


force that operates beyond the word and seeks its 
throne in sound, pulsating from race to race. 
Both tongue and ear are forever teaching each 
other or being taught. The plastic, impregnated 
air about us forms our speech; the newspapers in 
which we root and wallow deform it. The na- 
tive soil rumbles and declaims underfoot as at 
Elsinore or Delphos; and the trembling grains in 
the tympani of our hearts and brains respond. 
Ears that have not lost this mystic communion 
with the mother soil are able to hear coming 
events cast their echoes before, as one may hear 
the thunder of the far-off train already murmur- 
ing in the rail. Artificial languages that reek of 
the lamp instead of the soil can take no real 
root—Volapiuk, Esperanto, Ido. 

But can poetry find a universal form or speech 
—like music or color? Rudolf Blimner of the 
“Sturm” declares that he has found it; but has 
he not rather lost poetry and found merely 
another form of music? He has closed the doors 
and shuttered the windows, and left us in the 
dark with a barbarian chanting in a strange, 
melodious tongue—incomprehensible to us. We 
demand sense from speech, if not from sound. 

The discoverer or inventor of absolute poetry 
utters, rather pompously, a warning to those who 






THE “ABSOLUTE” POEM 113 


would lightly or wantonly imitate without having 
before them the great rounded form or feeling in 
themselves—the plastic, Dedalian rhythm. But 
we need not fear that an impressionistic world 
will suddenly plunge itself into the Nirvana of 
absolute, expressionistic poetry. We shall con- 
tent ourselves with relative poetry and its cum- 
brous baggage train of words packed with 
meanings. | 

But when the impulse is upon us to make a 
primitive, spontaneous oral music, in which we 
are at once composer, instrument, theme and con- 
ductor, then we may abandon ourselves to some 
such spontaneous composition, unbridled by any- 
thing save the ear. The beauty of sound re- 
mains independent of meaning—as when we hear 
a rich voice singing but not the words sung; or 
when the nightingale attacks our hearts at night. 

Blimner’s theory is highly subjective, but it 
is also rooted in instinct and nature, and so it 
cannot be dismissed as mere nonsense. It may 
even develop itself into an art—akin to the dance. 
But sense is the body of poetry, and we do not 
wish to disembody it into mere sound, any more 
than we wish to disembody the flower into mere 
perfume. 


VI 
A PHAN AGAINST THE AGE 


AMAZEMENT comes upon me and sometimes a 
kind of impersonal envy when I see the predomi- 
nance of poetry in the lists of German publishers. 
‘There are firms which publish whole series of the 
younger and newer poets. 

Everywhere in Germany the prices of paper 
and printing reached Himalayan heights dur- 
ing the war and still higher during the false 
peace following, and have doomed even many a 
newspaper to extinction. Yet, notwithstanding 
this, new volumes of poetry appear day after day, 
advances and royalties are paid, second to tenth 
and even higher editions are achieved. 

The public reverences, the public buys, the 
public reads; almost, one might say, the public 
writes poetry. 

The Revolution has unloosed a flood of spir- 
itual energies, hitherto confined within the iron 
channels of duty or rigid order. Suffering has 


wrung a lyric cry from the soul of an entire 
114 


A PHAN AGAINST THE AGE 115 


people. The nation struggles like Laocoén, but 
at least the sons of Laocoén have not ceased to 
sing. Contention of every kind to right and 
left, before and behind, upward and downward, 
has brought new hatreds into the field, new as- 
pirations and perspectives. 

Metaphysical adventurers, Schwarmers of the 
universal have piled up towering Utopias, shim- 
mering with iridescent bubble-domes. And these 
mirages are the brighter because reared against 
skies dun and thunder-stuffed above a waste. 

If one be to singing born there is an end that 
shapes one’s divinity. In the destinies of na- 
tions it comes to pass that this end is sometimes, 
as in human destinies, the Ultima Thule of 
despair. 

The note of revolt rises sharp, clear and in- 
clement. The poet demands his place in creative 
politics; he aspires to power in the community. 

The lyric passion becomes a flag, a beacon, a 
torch firing the conflagration of the Menschhetts- 
gedanken. 

Thus poetry in a mechanistic age becomes an 
Archimedean lever to wrench the cracking old 
structures asunder. 

A people fatally unskilled in politics, awakens 
and develops as never before its soaring and dom- 


116 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


inant passion for high poetry—almost one with 
its congenital passion for music. 

As an observer of phenomena of the spirit, I 
establish and record these things. They are, to 
be sure, inaudible and invisible to the casual 
visitor and to the bulk of newspaper corres- 
pondents. 

Many significant and dynamic singers have 
arisen. One is constantly startled by the weight, 
wealth and power of their song. Genius, gifts, 
uncommon talents abound—enough to leaven a 
whole epoch, if not pent within the confines of 
one language. Here I shall write of only one 
singer out of this great and variegated legion, and 
of but one book of his—Johannes Becher and his 
“Pean Against the Age,” one of twenty-five or 
more volumes of “Neue Lyrik” published by 
Kurt Wolff of Munich. 

Becher as a poet is by no means one of the 
greater figures, but he is one of the most signif- 
icant. 

This book, like his former book, “To Europe,” 
is a furious reaction against the war, against the 
civilization that could breed such a war, against 
the humanity that could breed such a civilization. 
It is a fierce denunciation of our day and its abor- 








A PHAN AGAINST THE AGE 117 


tions—a warning of the new doom with which 
it Is pregnant. 

Becher would blast the worm-tunneled struc- 
ture in which a thousand death-watches tick, with 
his disintegrating lines would 


. create the Peak, chiseling it 
Out of the tougher granite 
Of the rolling peoples. .. . 
Crystal peak, God-Gaurisankar. Love’s galaxy. 


He came striding forth with an iron harp out 
of the cataclysmic welter of the war, its draft 
foul upon him, naked of all illusions, wounded 
within and without, shaken. 

Reversed, rebellious, feeling himself flame- 
and blood-anointed to be the protagonist of Man 
the Martyr, he went staggering across the desola- 
tion of Europe with flickering eyes fanatically 
bent upon the goal of reconciliation, upon the 
reconstruction of a world-soul that was to purge 
a leprous planet, dwell in it and make it luminous 
as never before. 

He would incite humanity unto rebellion 
against itself, would lash the herds stewing in 
low swamps and level prairies of existence to 
erect themselves, if need be by eruption, into 


Sa Bers oo 
A al 


118. NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


hills and cliffs. Ah, if they would arouse them- 
selves, only once, into cleansing billows to wash 
away their own pollutions! 

Flame strikes at our eyes from out this book. 
A stench ascends from it to craze the brains of 
the gods with the savor of their works. The 
poems often repel, sometimes they infuriate or 
sicken. 

They are cries from the battlefield, from the 
cot in the field hospital, from the tumuli of stark 
and livid corpses whose every wound has become 
a mouth. 

Women appear, saint or strumpet, luminous 
for a moment like stained-glass figures in churches 
lost in the typhoon of battle, and blooming 
against the flames of shell-riddled towns. Night- 
mares spin phantasmagorias. 

The instigators of war feel the rabid, catapult- 
ing hatred of this poet; he dooms them to wallow 
in a hell of mud—himself wallowing in a mud 
of words, of broken phrases that are like frag- 
ments of shells, of single words into which, as 
though they were bombs, he would compress the 
energy of pages. 

The lines burst with wild ejaculations, with 
wrenched words, and with an expressionistic fury 








A PHAN AGAINST THE AGE 119 


that rises above or sinks below the level of co- 
herence. 

Kaleidoscopic images, intermingled and over- 
laid like palimpsests in which the ghosts of erased 
texts suddenly stare forth in their original black- 
ness! Becher demands an expansive imagination 
from his readers. 

His gorge, his entire soul revolted by the bes- 
tialities of the human slaughter-house, he drags 
forth its horrors in merciless honesty to his own 
emotions, so that he may infect his audience with 
the same intense abhorrence. 

He would not only draw the curtain, but de- 
stroy it. Like the victims of the red martyrdom 
themselves, his verses writhe with ghastly and 
gruesome figures, immensely powerful because 
they are coined or chosen by a true poet, and take 
on something of his grace. 

Tangled entrails, the red pits of wounds, pus 
that crawls, the sweetish heavy scent of dead 
bodies, gangrene, fragments of flesh, mire, ex- 
crement, blood, sweat, the satanic steel that sings 
through the air and encysts itself in soft and 
precious flesh or shears off arms, heads or legs. 

A steward of a Banquo’s feast to sicken War 
with his own masterpieces. A Wierz among 


“ea 


120 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


poets, but one whose work, unlike that of the 
Belgian master of the terrible, is the fruit of vi- 
sions branded upon soul and brain by realities. 

He would unravel and annul all the lines 
which poets have ever written to the glory of 
war. For the captains and the kings he has but 
one word: 


Down! accursed offal of every zone! 

Down! villainous spawn of ages old and new! 

Go leap, my poinard verse, into the throats of monsters! 
Down, bloodhounds, down! Go crashing, rattling down! 


Down! down! before undreamt-of lightning onsets— 


Like steam athwart the boiling geysers driven. 
Sharp bark the guns. The red bombs bellow— 
Ye ravishers, hangmen, killers or kings—down! down! 


Carnage rolls up from fields replowed, replanted. 

Down with the mixers of venom. With the poisoners of 
peoples, down! 

Gleam, knife! Breast, bare thyself! 

Down! down! So our brows may turn once more toward 
heavens clear and blue. 


The lines, turgid, cryptic and convulsed in the 
original, are rebellious to translation. 

It is difficult not to succumb to the power and 
tremendous momentum of this work, this fanatic, 
ecstatic song, uplifted from the inferno of the 











A PHAN AGAINST THE AGE 121 


Great Dying. From it there goes forth a poign- 
ant yearning for redemption from this pool of 
blood and filth, from the gloom and soot of vam- 
pirish factory towns, fortresses and prisons, grim- 
mer than those of Piranesi’s etchings. 

Becher’s master demon will not let him rest, 
but hounds him on with this elemental love for 
the reéstablishment of a new humanity in a new 
Eden, the meadows of which shall flower the 
brighter because of the corruption and the hu- 
man compost—man that was but manure— 
buried beneath them. 


. ... yet a new day shall broaden, shall shine— 

Will Love reconquer where murderous Hatred now 
hisses ; 

Will love anoint us with the dew of our brother-kisses— 

In the magic cloak of caresses enwrap us, divine? 


Becher’s earlier work vibrated with a lyric 
beauty which the expressionism of the war and the 
Revolution has dissolved into an ever greater an- 
archy of form. Lines such as his “Children’s 
Crusade” no longer flow from his pen: 


Loud sang they down the pathway of the mountains, 
A shining flock of many little lambs: 

“We have been wakened by the silver voices 

Of many birds slain on the nightly meads.”’ 





122 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Thin like white flags streamed from their limbs the gar- 
ments ; 

They bound a cross out of the stalks of flowers, 

Before them psalmed the bells out of the hamlets: 

“O that Jerusalem illume the valley!” 

“Wolves will devour you in the ancient forests!” ; 

“Nay, us the evil beasts would never harm, 

The snow-white Saviour will forever shield us!” 


Storm at the Cape shattered the holy ship— 
_ Now giant sharks swing eyes of fire above them— 
Eternal lamps that sway above their graves... . 


In his still further deliquescence and dismem- 
berment of form—as in the “Vorstrophen” and 
the “Nachstrophen” of the present volume— 
Becher explodes in fragments and tatters of 
phrases. ‘The words become mere stepping-stones 
in the rushing torrent of his emotion: 


Arm-sickles sweep gulch-roadways high! 

Head-thistle hiss cloud-sponges. Moon: hole— 

How man sways man: Ha! shoreless, ha! 

Woman through light turns a dishevelled lap. 

Screams cries man! Man! That drumming thunder 
weaves. 


The poem becomes a stenograph—a disarticu- 
lated skeleton, helpless with the heresy of ultra- 
expressionism. 





A PHAN AGAINST THE AGE 123 


The tragic and terrible are reduced to the 
ejaculatory, as this in turn is reduced to the 
grotesque and meaningless—thought and emotion 
escape as from a sieve. 

The profounds of violence and passion in 
Johannes Becher are still troubled by the con- 
cussions of the war, the vortices of the Revolution 
in whose body germinates the body of that 
greater Revolution he and his brethren foresee 
and foretell. 

When this tormented volcano shall have voided 
its mud and lava, we may behold it again with 
a white cloud above its mouth by day and at 
night a rose-red glow in which the stars tremble. 


VII 
THE ARCHITECTURE OF ASPIRATION 


Ir is not the vertical flight of Gothic I mean, 
driven heavenward on the wings of medieval 
ecstasy and prayer. I who was myself an archi- 
tect in that city of visitations, San Francisco, be- 
fore the last fire and earthquake, would interpret 
a new vision to all my former colleagues. 

I would preach a new passion in building, the 
recrudescence, almost violent in its vitality, of 
the old primitive impulse to build, anchored in 
nature, glorified by art. 

I would proclaim the revival of this instinct in 
a form almost religious, the clearance of a build- 
ing site for a new spiritual edifice, the liberation 
of the great mother of arts from dead forms and 
petrified canons that have made architecture a 
sterile art in our age. 

Here is a way to free it from brittle archeology 
and the utilitarian engineering of the commercial 
spirit, the ant-and-bee complex of the skyscraper, 


the villainous speculation of the jerry-builder. 
I24. 









ww 
> ; 





THE ARCHITECTURE OF ASPIRATION 125 


From the prostration of his spirit let the 
Builder arise once more—as Artist and as Poet. 

Bruno Taut and his brother Max are practical 
architects in practical Berlin, trained master 
builders and technicians, among the most skilled 
in Germany. The Revolution freed them from 
schools and orders; they broke old dogmas and 
new ground. 

They felt that the chrysalis of the mechanistic 
age contained nothing living, that it fettered the 
builder, his hand and fancy. 

- In War, that grim Anti-Architect, that supreme 
Nihilist and Negation, they saw likewise a force 
that would crush and splinter forms and cara- 
paces that had become rigid with death, and make 
room for something new and adventurous that 
throbbed with the pulse of a new era and a fairer 
dispensation. 

Bruno Taut in particular, the constructive 
dreamer and poet, has evolved an entire new phi- 
losophy of building, a new relationship of man to 
architecture, a new function for it in nature and 
society. 

Architecture is once more to become not only 
one of the tongues or organs of religion and rhap- 
sody, but a sublimation of that instinct, that will 
to build which thrills in the blood and bones 





of the races and bids them erect simulacra of 
their souls in their architecture. Out of this con- 
figuration is to emerge transfiguration. 

The program is vast, but its impracticability 
for the present generation exists only in its 
vastness. 

It is nothing less than the metamorphosis of 
the world in which we live. 

‘Building is to be an active instrument in the 
new order of a free society, a factor for human 
peace and understanding. 

It is to rear a house of happiness and beauty 
for the peoples. 

Frontiers are to be erased, the ‘“‘tentacular”’ 
cities are to be dissolved. 

Engineering is to fertilize, architecture to 
glorify the earth. 

The program is continental, even planetary. 

But the war with tts fury of hatred and destruc- 
tion has proved that all things might be possible 
with a fury of love and labor. 

The first step in the liberation from the aca- 
demic was the shattering of alien forms and out- 
lived historical patterns and molds through the 
disintegrating agency of Expressionism. 

This seeks freedom through the obliteration, the 





THE ARCHITECTURE OF ASPIRATION 127 


dismemberment and dissolution of the object; it 
seeks release from the theory of the Thing. 

It claims the right of self-determination, so to 
speak, for vital forms fitted to survive. Abso- 
lute art, the abstract emotion, and the abstract 
thought are to create the forms and vessels of 
their own life. 

In all this, of course, there is menace and dan- 
ger. One step more and liberation from form 
drowns in its own chaos. 

In Taut’s new architectural cosmos there 1s 
also a nebulous mystic element, a feverish, occult 
intoxication arising from the turmoil of the Revo- 
lution. One is at first almost revolted by this 
revolt. Is an architect at work here—or an 
-anarch? 

Even upon the paper on which these visions 
are fixed in color and in charcoal, they melt and 
blur in the struggle between the idea and the form. 

They are spontaneous, inconsequent and spor- 
tive—they appear to be the exotic emanations of 
a nature that teems with form and must bring it 
forth in endless variety. 

But in all this but the luxuriance of an orchid- 
tangle reared upon the compost of wrecked and 
rotting art elements? 





128 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


And yet these visions, for all their ecstasy, are 
founded upon law and even science, upon a defi- 
nite philosophy of life and an economic system 
which must command the attention of those who 
realize the power of the inspirational, the spon- 
taneous, the demonic and prophetic in art and 
history. 

This is more than a flight from the muddy 
reality of to-day to a world of the romantic and 
the bizarre. 

Bruno Taut’s world is modern. It speaks in 
free iron and steel, in plastic concrete, in walls 
of glass, in polychrome, in light, in the monu- 
mental use of water. 

It is architecture applied to the landscape and 
the planet. It is the spiritualization of the en- 
vironment. Had Poe extended his “Domain 
of Arnheim” into the architectural, he would 
have unlocked some such Utopia of use and 
beauty. 

We have to deal here with a superb gift—a 
project with many specifications in detail for con- 
verting the slum of the world into a palace or a 
secular cathedral. 

The ‘House Beautiful” is to be something 
more than a phrase for esthetes and coteries 
in the arts and crafts. It is to be elevated and 












we ie rns 


THE ARCHITECTURE OF ASPIRATION 129 


kept holy as a cosmopolitan imperative—the 
earth as a goodly dwelling, healthy and airy, a 
dome, a star of liberty and light. 

The edifice is to be one with edification. 

In his book “The City Crown,” Taut ex- 
pounds his plans for the creation, the culture of 
organic cities of the future, the functional parts 
grouped round a central structure of monumental 
proportions raised on an eminence—a temple of 
the people, a cathedral of the communal soul. 
All the needs of the modern, nay, of the future 
municipality are considered, and a harmonious 
entity is projected, developing naturally like a 
crystal or a flower, instead of morbidly like the 
industrial cancer. 

Then conviction came to Bruno Taut that the 
modern metropolis was in itself pernicious—that 
it was necessary to sunder it into groups and 
guilds, into small communities and_ isolated 
estates. 

It were better that these constructed atrocities 
should collapse. Like Jules Méline, he saw that 
the cities were the abysses of humanity. 

When wisdom comes to dwell among men for 
something longer than an hour or two, the ter- 
ritories of the nations will undergo divisions 
strange and non-imperialistic and will be arranged 


130 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


with loving care to suit the need for happiness 
of an order of society which will be built upon 
our remains like the Rome of marble upon the 
Rome of brick. 

The visionary drawings in black and white, the 
colored sketches in the remarkable book called, 
“The Dissolution of the Cities,’ with their en- 
thusiastic hand-printed titles, their poetic inscrip- 
tions and simple arguments and pleas, all 
printed from plates on paper of different tints, 
stun and dazzle by their limitless audacity. 

This seems Chinese, Martian, Laputan flori- 
culture. The forms appear capricious, rudimen- 
tary—again, the equation of natural forces as in 
the snow crystal, or in the exquisitely starlike 
forms of the radiolaria already offered for 
esthetic exploitation by Ernst Haeckel in his 
“Art Forms of Nature.” But here, too, the def- 
inite goal exists—a regenerated social world with 
a liberated architecture as a conscious driving and 


shaping power. This strange work has a text— 


a chorus of denunciations of cities by famous 
writers from Rousseau to Whitman. 

Man’s spirit, reinforced by every technical and 
mechanical auxiliary, is to reshape the planet, 
realizing Omar’s cry. 


c ne 





THE ARCHITECTURE OF ASPIRATION 131 


What is the earth but one tremendous mass 
of raw material? Therefore, the earth must be- 
come plastic to Man the Master Builder. 

Nature even in her greatest manifestations, 
in the expression of her wildest, most elemental 
savagery, must succumb to Art. 

Earth is to aspire to become a.star, to convert 
herself into a tellurian Heaven. 

This is the message of Taut’s “Alpine Archi- 
tecture.” In this book he has striven upon the 
basis of a grandiose conception, to convert the 
most beautiful regions of the Alps into a “Hymn 
to the glory of Earth.”’ Of such splendors might 
Kubla Khan have dreamed. 

Cyclopean forces are ready to give birth to 
cyclopean effects. 

Why not the future realization of the impos- 
sible dream in natural architecture, like many a 
dream once thought impossible in science? 

Why not air castles in an age which already 
sees them flying? 

Why not the mountain moved by the atom 
when the force of the atom is finally released? 

The great massifs of the peaks are to be 
blasted and ground into colossal crystals or 
jewels, perhaps with polished or green-planted 


OT Ss oe ae 
. ae oe ve 


132 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


facets. Villages in green or rose-red valleys are 
~ to take on the shapes of stars and flowers. 

Domes of trapezoidal glass are to glitter on 
heights or in gorges, aflame at night with electric 
fire ground out by the fettered waterfalls. 

Temples are to arise on columns of cast ruby 
glass. Mountain lakes are to be pent in basins 
or fall brimming from terraces. 

The purpose? None, save Reverence and 
Beauty. 

The price? A tithe of the cost of a third- 
class war. 

The incentive? Joy. 

A cosmic harmony soars through this choral 
architecture and gathers fresh volume and im- 
petus on every level. It rises from (1) the Crys- 
tal House to (2) the Architecture of the Hills, 
(3) Alpine Construction, (4) the Building of 
the Earth-rind, (5) The Building of the Star. 
To the clients of this architect much of this, 
bound as they are by the chains of matter and 
by the inertia and gravitation of human nature, 
must remain symbolical. 

In his ‘Builder of Worlds,’’ Bruno Taut has 
given us an architectural drama, set to symphonic 
music. It is dedicated to the spirit of Paul 





THE ARCHITECTURE OF ASPIRATION 133 


Scheerbart, a dreamer of Dedalian imagination, 
the author of “GJas-Architektur.” 

This cosmic drama in terms of architecture is 
capable of actual production. It is soon to be 
staged—the wonderful “Fortuny Horizont’ with 
its ethereal atmospheric effects, its colored lights 
and limitless distances, will solve most of the 
difficulties. 

This spectacle attacks us from many angles— 
through vision, music, human solidarity, form 
and color, the feeling for space—that sixth 
sense—working expansively within us, and the 
imagination unloosed in immensities teeming 
with the birth and death of form. 

The curtain parts. 

A stage without floor, ceiling or background 
furnishes the playground for this drama of form. 
It is flooded with a vibrant yellow light. 
Spheral music rings and thrills in a waveless 
monotone, rising and swelling in intensity as the 
forms and colors emerge. 

The tip of a glorious spire rises from the pro- 
founds, a fantastic cathedral front follows, but- 
tresses leap into place as it sways upward, de- : 
tails fly to garner and enrich it like doves homing 
to their perches. 


Birman uminaT Cea ibe SEG Dots yy gles 


134 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Rose windows, half-fluid, half-flaming, melt 
-and coalesce in huge kaleidoscopic play. 

The great organism lives and gives life. 

A titanic portal blooms forth, slides and 
lurches and shifts. 

The facade bursts open like a flower; a torrent 
of forms gushes forth, these swing and sway into 
constellations of arches, pendants, groins and 
airy vaults—iridescent light—bells. This closes, 
inclines itself, revolves. 

Lines and shapes intersect, diagonals dart 
across, fissures strike like black lightnings; the 
whole shudders, bends, collapses. 

The forms liberate themselves, disintegrate in 
a rhythmic dance, dissolve to atoms and are re- 
absorbed into space. 

The light changes. 

Deep azure-green vibrates. The music re- 
cedes to unconjectured distances. 

The Void is dark blue and unfathomable. 

Stars and planets flash. 

Two stars emerge from Chaos, dancing in spi- 
ral veils of fire mist. ‘They kiss—one vanishes. 

The cathedral star (Domstern), shaped like 
a faery snowflake, glitters and turns, trailing 
streamers of light. 





THE ARCHITECTURE OF ASPIRATION 136 


A meteor sweeps into its centre. The fecund 
Void glows with a reddish purple. 

Descends a rain of leaves and flower forms. 
The rondure of the Earth rises, a pale, luminous 
green under violet skies. Thunder. Diluvian 
rains. A many-banded arc vaults across the 
firmament. 

Summer sunlight. 

The green mantle of the earth breaks into 
blossom ; huts and human habitations push forth, 
tents unfold. 

The earth is a garden studded unto the distant 
horizon with shining homes. 

A pean of joyous Earth music. The voices of 
children. 

The House rises on a hill like a gigantic nose- 
gay, a pyramid of fruits, crystals and grasses. 

The Crystal House blazes forth. The stage 
lamps bathe it in waves of ruby light. 

It opens, revealing: the Hall of the Peoples 
—wonder upon wonder, luminous cascades, foun- 
tains of fire, glittering roofs and walls of 
massive glass, floating spheres of gold and 
silver. 

A revel of dancing and oscillating form, light 
and color, a climax of solar glory, an architec- 


136 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS> 


tonic ecstasy, an apotheosis of the aspiration to 
build! 

The whole congeals and crystallizes in tower- 
ing and triumphant forms! 

These are indeed, petrified music-tongues that 
sing of Truth and Beauty in the language of a 
living architecture. 

The music prolongs itself on a single long- 
drawn note. 

The curtain closes. 

It is tragic and significant that these Faust-like 
visions, this lyric architectural liberation, should 
manifest themselves in a land which, once bright 
and slumless, is now full of misery and conges- 
tion, a land in which few new homes can be built, 
where architecture has become an imprisoned art, 
a long and terrible repression. 

Yet it is precisely here that this dream is tak- 
ing shape in spasmodic, tentative efforts, in ob- 
scure corners under incredible difficulties and ex- 
pense. The materials may be prosaic—concrete, 
wood, cement, stucco, even adobe; but the cre- 
ative artist stands behind them. — 

Though still stumbling along the river-beds 
and moraines, the spirit of Bruno Taut’s “Alpine 
Architecture” is already at work in the construc- 
tion of communal dwellings in garden spots, in 








THE ARCHITECTURE OF ASPIRATION 137 


the reclamation and beautifying of waste moor- 
lands, in the attempt to give a city like gray old 
Magdeburg, of which Taut has been appointed 
City Architect, a new face and a new message, 
until it has been given the name of Die bunte 
Stadt—the vari-colored city. 

With pen and pencil, with brush and trowel, 
this builder is giving voice to the creative and 
ascendant impulses of his people. 


Vill 
THE VISIBLE SYMPHONY 


Tue Director-General of the largest German film 
concern had just effected a certain amalgamation 
with a well-known American company, and after 
a brilliant harangue upon the international sig- 
nificance of the film before a small group of Ber- 
lin editors, concluded as follows: 

~ “T believe the function of the German film is 
to give the American film that which it does not 
possess—and that is soul.” 

The fact may not be flattering, but the fact 
remains. It is furthermore reinforced by the re- 
volt of the cultivated American against his own 
film banality and by the success of certain Ger- 
man films of high rank in America and England. 

The particular cretinism which strove to con- 
ceal the original titles of these powerful histori- 
cal films under crass and trashy abstractions like 
“Passion” and “Deception,” or attempted to hide 
the country of origin, instead of (with a subtler 


instinct of réclame) exploiting the fact, I shall 
138 








THE VISIBLE SYMPHONY 139 


leave to be investigated by such honest experts 
in our mental miscarriages as Mr. Mencken or 
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks. The nausea of the 
American over the mass-product of his mam- 
monized film industry, has also been made clear 
to me by many cuttings referring to the “Dr. 
Caligari” film which were sent me by friends in 
America, and by many letters full of malediction 
_ against the native product. 

It is amusing that but a little while ago the 
German producers and critics were in great fear 
lest Germany be overwhelmed and debauched by 
the avalanche of American Wild West, detec- 
tive and “pritty gurl’ films. This additional 
punishment was by some Germans philosophi- 
cally regarded as the inevitable attempt of the 
victor to impose his Kz/tur upon the vanquished. 
But history has proved that the vanquished 
often imposes zs Kultur upon the victor. 

In the biology of nations, America and Ger- 
many (and Russia) are young nations—as 
France and England are old. But Germany has 
deep adult roots, where we as yet have but in- 
fantile or at most juvenile feelers. Germany is 
also forced and always has been forced by her 
unfavorable geography, her political history, her 
poor soil and the harsh fate that has so often be- 


/ SS a 
140 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


fallen her people, to an intensive cultivation or 
-admuinistration of her activities, products and in- 
stitutions. Her specialized militarism, for ex- 
ample, suitable only for her own needs, has now 
been blindly adopted by the victors. Her highly 
trained, rigid but efficient bureaucracy has been 
imitated by her enemies—though they have ac- 
tually succeeded in importing only the rigidity. 

It is characteristic that in a country which 1s 
to-day practically without raw materials of its 
own, such terms as Veredelungsprozess (process 
of ennoblement—as applied to material) and 
Qualitats-Ware (quality goods) should be the 
slogans of manufacturers standing on the brink 
of anabyss. ‘There are no doubt sound economic 
reasons for this—if anything be still sound in 
European economics. This process of Veredel- 
ung has now been applied to the German film 
—for a long time poor in quality and negligible 
in quantity—and strangely enough it has also 
been applied to the American film as this 1s 
known here. 

The American film has given certain external 
values and types to the German film, and this 
influence has been beneficial, for the German is 
in general obsessed far more with content and | 
Stimmung than with form or action. In his 





THE VISIBLE SYMPHONY 141 


modern Lichtspiele he has now learned to com- 
bine all four. The great energy, genius, expe- 
Tience, enterprise and devotion to art which char- 
acterize the German theatre were a source of 
wealth and power which was suddenly placed at 
the disposal of the German film companies. In 
the ascendancy of her films Germany is now reap- 
ing the reward for the love, care and thorough- 
ness she has lavished upon her theatres genera- 
tion after generation. The capitalists and film 
impresarios are also wise enough to leave the pro- 
duction of these light-plays in the hands of ac- 
complished artists and to the appreciation of an 
art-loving public. 

It was inevitable, if only by the sheer, visible 
preponderance of a quality which no war hatreds 
or propaganda could obscure, that these German 
artists should, for example, teach the English 
and the French how their own history should be 
filmed. 

The German conspiracy against making the 
world safe for idiocy in the realm of the film has 
just assumed the form of another daring experi- 
ment. It is an attempt to detach the film from 
all reality and to infuse it with a new esthetic, 
sensuous and spiritual content. Here the film 
soars, if only as a medium, into the realm of 





142 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


purely abstract art. Through the possibilities 
-—technical, actinic and spatial—presented by 
the film, we have now attained to the painter of 
music. This new magician is a young painter 
—Walter Ruttmann by name. He has given us 
the true music film, has interpreted the audible 
in terms of the visible and broken down the bar- 
riers or the frontiers between two senses. There 
has, of course, always been much smuggling and 
signalling across these frontiers that lie between 
seeing and hearing. 

The jargon of art critics resounds with terms 
taken from the vocabulary of musicians. That 
of the musical critics is polychromatic with colors 
borrowed from the painter’s palette. One would 
think that painters laid on color with a fiddle- 
bow, that fiddlers played with a mahlstick. 
Every American schoolboy from eight to eighty 
will assure you with the air of communicating a 
fresh and ingenuous discovery that a blind man 
once thought that red resembled the sound of a 
trumpet. 

Never do IJ read a review of an American novel 
without stumbling upon the dull and dun mo- 
notony of that favorite word “colorful.” Never 
do I see the sickly green mildew upon the Amer- 
ican war bacon sold upon barrows in Berlin, N., 





THE VISIBLE SYMPHONY 143 


but I seem to hear the eloquence of Woodrow 
Wilson. 

Walter Ruttmann is an expressionist artist and 
to him the film is but a subject thing, a means to 
anend. He has calmly stuck his brush between 
the spinning reels of the film ribbon and has said: 
“Be still. Become my canvas.” 

Music is the most transcendent and ethereal, 
the most detached and abstract of all arts—the 
only true expressionistic art. Ruttmann closed 
the circle between the expressionistic painter and 
the musician—who need by no means be expres- 
sionistic in the matter of style or technique. 
The link or bridge he used was color, moving 
color, piled upon the thin, translucent, inflam- 
mable band—that artificial chemical plasma, an 
interpretative medium of still unfathomed pos- 
sibilities, an actinic voice, a vision, that soars 
beyond its mean mechanical or photographic ort- 
gin,—actually the light-blood of a new art. 

Ruttmann’s technique in elaborating his visible 
music was that already, if very primitively, em- 
ployed in the manufacture of the trick or comic 
film—the moving cartoon drawn by hand—the 
true moving picture as opposed to the moving 
photograph. Ruttmann has now produced the 
moving painting, though in this instance it is an 


eee? MAN eas 
rs : Lo ey , 
car ee vse | 


144 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


abstract painting—his expression of another 
- man’s symphony. It was necessary to produce 
thousands upon thousands of drawings, executed 
with a microscopic accuracy, as well as to insure 
an exact and faithful registration. 

It was then necessary to color these drawings 
with fixed, graduated or variable colors—a task 
requiring the most prodigious patience and a kind 
of sixth sense or mathematical Raumgefuhl, 
capable of synchronizing time and movement 
—different movements at the same and at differ- 
ent times—a sort of running application of the 
theory of relativity. 

The celluloid ribbon actually became a canvas 
to this painter, a magic traveling canvas upon 
which not only his colors became alive and in- 
tensified through the agency of light, but also 
one upon which his forms became alive and gi- 
gantically mobile, through the agencies of mag- 
nification and movement. 

The music translated into color and form ac- 
complishes its destiny within so-and-so many of 
the tiny sections of the film ribbon at the tempo 
decided upon by composer, by painter and by 
operator. The film, which like the lens once as- 
pired to usurp the prestige accorded to art, is 
once more reduced to its proper place. It has 





THE VISIBLE SYMPHONY 145 


now become a medium, a servitor, a carrier of 
art. Not a form of art, but a function, or a 
functionary. 

Ruttmann’s first attempt was, as I have said, in 
the nature of an illustration rather than a direct 
creation. His theme was musical Opus I, Sym- 
phony in Three Parts—by a composer named 
Brinning. An interpretation, a paraphrase. 
This visible symphony was recently performed in 
Berlin before a small group of artists, musicians 
and film adepts. Expectancy and skepticism 
were in the air. 

The room faded away. Darkness. A few 
moments’ impressive pause, as though to wash 
away the last clinging contacts with the external 
world. The machine began to purr, letters and 
titles flickered for a moment phosphorescently. 
Then—the opening notes of the symphony—iri- 
descent atmospheres surcharged with an intense 
and vibrant light, burned and dissolved upon the 
screen. ‘These served as backgrounds, melting 
and flowing into one another—dawnlight and 
sunburst and twilight, infinite reaches of space, 
with the caroling blue of morning or the dark 
saturated stillness of the night sky or with a gray 
terror vacue. 

The separate notes and cadences of the sym- 


Samay Te ah esos!) Seedy Ao WS, 
elk! rhe a a Coma 4 wah 
See ted ual. 


146 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


phony darted and floated into these luminous 
fields, as though the notes of the composition had 
shaken off their schematic disguises of black dots 
and lines and broken through the bars of the 
score and the sound waves of the instruments, 
and converted themselves into a river of flam- 
boyant color. 

Some of the forms these colors assumed were 
already familiar to us in the restless paintings 
of the Cubists and Expressionists—triangles, 
trapezoids, cubes, circles, spirals, squares, disks, 
crescents, ellipses—all the usual fragmentary 
and activistic geometry. But here the writhing, 


shifting, interlacing, interlocking, intersecting 


elements were fluent and alive, moving to the laws 
of a definite rhythm and harmony, obedient to an 
inherent will and impulse. 

One suddenly felt or rather saw the laws of 
Eurhythmy at work, the threefold laws of the 
architecture of rhythm, the basic rudiments of 
the music of the spheres according to which all 
things in the Universe, in life and in art must live 
and move— 

the simple and uniform, thus: —-—-—— 

the regularly alternating, thus: —-~—w 

and the irregular, thus; —~~—— 

Bubbles and foams of color danced or wal- 


y 





THE VISIBLE SYMPHONY 147 


lowed across the screen, fountains and jets of light 
and shadow shot into infinity, waves—great, 
thundering beachcombers of brilliant sound— 
came galloping on, heaving, palpitating, rising to 
a crescendo, throwing off a serpentine of pearls 
or a thin glittering spray that floated away lke 
some high note, piercing, sustained, ecstatic. 
Globes and disks of harmonious colors came roll- 
ing into the field, some cannoning furiously 
against others, some buoyant as toy balloons, some 
kissing or repulsing or merging with one another 
like white or red blood corpuscles. Triangles 
sharp as splinters darted across the rushing tor- 
rent of forms. Clouds rolled up, spread, dis- 
solved, vanished. Serpents of flame blazed 
through this pictured music, a colored echo, no 
doubt, of some dominating note. 

From time to time, flickering and wavering in 
and out, over and under this revel of Klang- 
farbe, or sounding color, the Leitmozif appeared 
in playful, undulant lines, like lightning over a 
landscape or a golden thread through a tapestry. 
Then the color equivalents of the strong, clear 
finale poured themselves like a cataract upon the 
scene—masses of oblongs and squares fell crash- 
ingly, shower upon shower. ‘The silent sym- 
phony was over. Was it only an aural-optical 


148 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


illusion that one’s ears seemed to ring with the 
vibrations of this symphony heard through the 
eye? 

The waves and vibrations of color had been 
borne along parallel, as it were, with the waves 
of sound. During the performance an invisible 
conductor’s wand seemed to play upon the screen, 
rising, falling, hovering, sweeping and circling 
according to the score of the original composer. 
The word Tonsetzer (tone-setter), which Ger- 
man purists in their war on alien words, use in 
place of Komponist, acquires something of a new 
meaning in connection with the setter of tonal 
color. 

The painter of music sees music as moving, 
rhythmical form and color, and hears these again 
as tones. ‘The expressionist artist seeks, by his 
abstraction or dissolution or shattering of the 
visible material world into “substanceless art,” 
to express some thought or emotion. But his 
paintings remain fixations, crystallizations— 
movement suggested but not transmitted, often 
unintelligible, or when vocal, speaking a tongue 
no one else understands. But once these expres- 
sionistic forms become animated by movement, 
they become clarified with meaning. 

Imperfect as these first attempts may still be, 








THE VISIBLE SYMPHONY 149 


the beauty and power of this symphony of the 
screen as painted by Walter Ruttmann must move 
all who come under its spell. And now that a 
new medium has been found, we are able to 
salute a new liberation of future possibilities, 
still unformulated, yet apperceived. 

This painted film of music in motion served, as 
I have already indicated, only as the echo, the 
shadow of another art. But if we apply the 
same principles to the original painted master- 
piece, what perspectives open before us! Why 
should not the great masters of the future, paint- 
ing upon the transparent film (large or small) 
instead of the opaque canvas, create a moving, 
instead of a static art? Up to the present all 
paintings, even the most sublime, have been noth- 
ing but still-life pictures. Would a true Corot 
gain or lose because the trees or the peasants were 
in motion? Would a portrait by Renoir or Sar- 
gent be any less a masterpiece because its eyes 
lived, its hands lifted or its head turned? 

If a new Botticelli were to paint his “Prima- 
vera” in real instead of implied progression, 
would it not bring a new beauty to his picture of 
dancing nymphs—namely, the dance itself? An 
historical painting by Menzel or Meissonier 
would be still a masterpiece, even if in motion, 


2 PA oy een ee od oe ne ree 
“hy UG RD cee Be 


150 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 
~ 


still a superb creation of style, unique, command- 
ing. Still?—I would say even more so. The 
means of expression at the disposal of individual 
genius would, in fact, be augmented by the pos- 
sibility of painting motion—yet remain true art 
—to the true artist. 

Whistler’s barge vanishing in the murk below 
Battersea Bridge would all the more irresistibly 
bear our souls with it than in the instant fixed 
by the artist in his two-dimensional water-color. 
Extension, which is but another name for Time, © 
would be added to the graphic arts—and also 
Movement, which is but another name for Life. 
The ban of the photograph, mobile and immo- 
bile, would be broken. ‘The obstacles that lie 
between this theory and its realization are purely 
mechanical, in part manual. They have already 
been conquered in practice. 

Among the master painters of the coming gen- 
erations, not even the most indurated classicist 
will think it unnatural that he should create mov- 
ing paintings. Nor would the master artists of 
the past have thought so had this apparatus been 
at their disposal. The procession that winds up 
the spirals of Trajan’s column—what is it but 
an historical film in marble? Many a Byzan- 
tine, medieval or Renaissance mural painting or 





THE VISIBLE SYMPHONY 151 


mosaic—say the procession of Emperor Justinian 
and Archbishop Maximilian in San Vitate at Ra- 
venna—might, by the intervention of artist, lens 
and film, be given the majesty of movement in 
addition to the majesty of treatment and com- 
position. But these venerable glories may well, 
or rather may best be left to their inaction, their 
divine mummihood. 

It is for the masters of the present and the fu- 
ture to conquer new worlds, I mean new media. 
We shall throw them these things—light, life, 
movement, color, music and the white naked 
screens or canvases of our receptive souls—as 
well as many cunning auxiliary engines. And 
we shall beg them to build in joy; or if build 
they cannot, then we shall bid them conjure forth 
—beauty. ‘That—even if we be duped—is an 
end in itself. And an eternal beginning. 


rho ¢ 2a 
Cae eee 


IX 


FIGURES OF WAR AND FORCES OF 
DEATH 


Many a major artist has projected himself be- 
yond the place and the hour and undergone his 
Gethsemane in an attempt to pierce, to seize and 
fix the Incommensurable, the Unfathomable of 
the Great War. But the war was a planetary 
and historic phenomenon, an epoch fixed upon 
the pivot of eternity. 

It spoke a language no poet had ever heard 
before. 

It spread itself upon canvases vast as conti- 
nents and it clamored for colors far below and 
far above the chromatic scale of the painter’s 
palette. 

Gray steel, red blood, and orange flame no 
longer gave a traditional solution. 

Baffled, the painter saw even the outer aspects 
of war elude him by following the advice of the 
insolent old conqueror—was it not Xerxes? 

They dived into the sea like fish; they bur- 


152 








ete eee Se 
Pa Ser 


FIGURES OF WAR, FORCES OF DEATH 153 


rowed into the earth like moles; they soared into 
the air like birds. 

All the elements they made their own, giving 
a new terror to fire, rarefying themselves even 
to gas, sublimating themselves into chemistry. 

Yet no new Goya arose, no Verestchagin. 

No Direr, no Breughel the elder, not even a 
Doré appeared to interpret the visible and pal- 
pable monsters spawned by the mechanistic age. 

Art was ground underfoot by the iron-shod 
hoofs of Behemoth. 

Where was the allegory? What was the sym- 
bol? The key? 

One master artist has found at least one an- 
swer in the simplest of human terms which are 
also the simplest of art—the naked human figure. 
He has torn a path through the tangle of the 
mechanical, penetrated the clouds of the chemi- 
cal, has freed himself from the obsession of the 
modern army of multitudes. 

He has once more reduced war to the elemental 
—the naked man and the naked weapon—the 
Hero and the Sword. 


Alexander Schneider, best known as Sascha 
Schneider, is a master draftsman, painter, and 
sculptor famous throughout Central Europe for 


(1b REMIT eM © aaNet aoe 


154 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


the heroic gesture of his art and for his impas- 
-sioned evangel of athletic beauty. 

He has already glorified with great breadth 
and power all that is left of the virile or the 
nobly tragic in modern life. 

Full of modern subtlety, he has remained un- 
corroded by modern morbidity. 

He has preached the creed of masculine beauty 
to the rising generation with his pencil. 

His allegories of modern sport and athletics 
have invested these with a fresh Olympian grace. 
Thus Schneider approached the prodigious task 
of embodying and reflecting the war in terms of 
the human body with a certain priestlike devotion 
to stark truth and beauty. 

He approached it from the classic angle with- 
out sinking into the archaic, or the academic. 

Twenty-four powerful and commanding draw- 
ings in crayon and charcoal gloom and lighten 
out of his handsome album in black and gold— 
“Figures of War and Forces of Death.” 

Here the human form becomes both the mat- 
ter and the mirror of war, the Thing and the 
Idea. 

These sinewy and plastic drawings, these 
shapes of warriors, women and spectres, stalk, 








FIGURES OF WAR, FORCES OF DEATH 155 


dance or craw] past our vision, enveloped with 
a fateful twilight, luminous with the aura of 
death or shining in the nimbus of a heroism 1r- 
radiant with swords. 

These drawings are timeless. 

Yet they express with august beauty and irre- 
sistible force all the terror, ruin, exaltation, the 
despair, self-immolation and courage, the Impo- 
tence in face of the Immanent Doom, the In- 
visible Force, the Vacuous Horror of modern 
war. 

And yet there is nothing neurasthenic nor dis- 
eased in this art. 

Death, cowled and belaureled and with flying 
tresses, grinning eye to eye with the golden- 
helmeted stripling, is no longer macabre. He is 
no longer even hostile, but the concluding sum, 
the end-goal, the last abiding nakedness beyond 
the naked flesh and the naked steel. 

Had the Greeks not abhorred the skeleton 
Death, they would have given him some such 
majesty. 

Had the Medizvals not despised the body, 
they would have thrown it into some such beauty 
of juxtaposition with its own Ultimate and been 
free of the grotesque. 





a. & Se eee a 
Pl eed oF ae g 
" ey, ips a sae 


156 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Schneider’s drawings lie beyond the good and 
evil of war. 

Yet the series is bound to a plan, and this plan 
is carried out in an unfettered sequence that re- 
flects the course of the Great War. 

We are first confronted by a black Shape with 
stiff plumes rearing over a huge casque, a broad 
spear and slant phosphorescent eyes burning out 
of: an iron visor. Its hands and feet are ar- 
mored, its front is hung horribly with human 
heads—“‘The War Spectre.” 

Then follows the “Call to War,’ a youth 
standing in a tempest, his black hair blown to 
horizontal lines—his legs widely stemmed—a 
shattering blast rolls out of a long, redoubled 
apocalyptic horn. 

“Enthusiasm,” a slender stripling with an ec- 
static face, waves a thin torch abloom with pale 
fire. 

“The Warrior,” erect and at rest, the formi- 
dable fighting animal, his dark locks blown to the 
outline of an eagle’s wings expanded, his mus- 
cular hands at rest upon the gleaming sword be- 
tween his legs. 

“The Flag,” its bars traverse, bright and 
dark, significantly hiding the head of the bearer, 
the headless, the heedless one, the Patriot to 





FIGURES OF WAR, FORCES OF DEATH 157 


whom its will is a flinty imperative, duty, self- 
sacrifice—the flag-bearer as Flagellant. 

“Chaos,” a mystic whirl of figures, male and 
female, interwoven, intermerged, deliquescent. 

“Thoughts of Death,” a bizarre and forced 
imagining—a young woman in panic flight, with 
two skulls embedded in and crowned with her 
own tresses. 

“The War Fury,” a Gorgon-headed hag danc- 
ing amidst bituminous smoke-drifts, and swing- 
ing the heads of her victims like censers. 

“Defeat,” a crippled sage, must be considered 
a failure of Schneider’s;—‘“Separation” and 
“Sorrow” are weak, or at least conventional in- 
terpretations. 

Schneider’s pencil has also sung a pzan to the 
concept of the Hero. 

“Courage’’ is celebrated in his shining, semi- 
divine form;—here flesh gleams almost like the 
marble meant to render the hero immortal. 

“The Testing of the Sword” and the “Fighter” 
are full of Apollonian grace and danger. 

“The Onset” shows a lithe and powerful form 
plunging with tremendous momentum into a 
thick and livid bank of poison mist. 

“The Sword Dance” is ecstatic, and full of 
prancing defiance. 


158 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


“The Hero,” with steel-filleted brow and 
- breast transfixed by a javelin, ascends serene and 
inert in an upheaval of light toward some Val- 
halla. 

“The Victor,” stern and majestic as Michael 
the Archangel, vibrates with falchions of pale, 
streaming fire. 

The shadows of doom and slaughter lie thick 
upon such plates as “The Struggle.” 

All the reasonless brutality and injustice of 
war cries out of the Laocoén-like group of the 
“Warrior in the Clutch of the Overmight.” 

“The Inexorable” is a cryptic and tortured 
composition, a brutal form perched upon another 
which it appears to be hollowing out with a great 
auger of flame, a symbol of human destiny under 
the relentlessness of war. 

“Death” reveals the Warrior transfigured, 
laureled and clarified, framed in his narrow sar- 
cophagus. 

And at the close there is ““Peace’’—that Peace 
that is the child of all wars, Peace the great 
minus-sign—a black-robed woman weeping, a 
naked lad with arms outstretched toward the 
great Unknown—the new generation, perhaps 
the new sacrifice, eternally recurrent. 

Sascha Schneider has created no pictures. He 








FIGURES OF WAR, FORCES OF DEATH 159 


has not attempted to illustrate the war, nor has 
he dealt in worn or bloodless allegories. 

He has incorporated for us in noble and ex- 
alted form the immediate soul of War, its mon- 
strous essences, manifestations and emotions. 

An artist’s eyes have looked upon the cata- 
clysm of the peoples, the paroxysm of civiliza- 
tion—a civilization which is no longer the mas- 
ter but only the raw material of the forces it has 
engendered. 

In this morphology of War, an artist of un- 
common vision has preserved all that deserves to 
survive in war—the heroic, the nobly tragic. 

These elements—like Art which exalts and en- 
shrines them—must not pass away, even though 
the nations go up like scraps of paper in the 
holocaust of humanity. 





xX 
THE LAUGHING SYNTHESIS 


One of the most amazing works of genius pub- 
lished in any language and in any land—per- 
haps at any time—is Arno Holz’s “Dze Blech- 
schmiede” (“The Tinsmithy’”). It is a world 
satire and it. is almost wholly in verse. One 
must risk one’s neck among the dynamics of ele- 
mental natural phenomena to find some appro- 
priate simile for it—the smooth green, glittering 
column of a vaulting geyser, a rhetorical volcano 
overflowing with the eloquence of its lava, a 
laughing maelstrom at kiss with death. Noth- 
ing like this work is to be found outside of Aris- 
tophanes or Rabelais, or, if we rise to the tragic- 
historic, the “‘Dynasts’” of Thomas Hardy, a 
work in which history stalks from story to story 
in iron sandals. 

Arno Holz is one of the most significant of 
German lyric poets, the founder and leader of a 


whole school. ‘Though he belongs to a genera- 
160 





THE LAUGHING SYNTHESIS 161 


tion already taking on the mellowness and crys- 
tallization of time, he is still in spirit to be num- 
bered among the younger men. Holz’s influence 
had even penetrated here and there into some of 
the English literary groups or coteries of the 
*90s. Arthur Symons has dedicated books and 
poems tohim. Holz is a master of finished form, 
of architectural rhythms, of Attic verse, light 
only in its music, but packed with matter and 
formidable with philosophical and_ historical 
meaning. Among the best-known works are 
“The Book of the Age,” “Ignorabimus,” ‘“Daf- 
nis,’ and “Phantasus.”’ He was one of the first 
revolutionaries in the realm of vers libre, a de- 
stroyer of old forms and the champion of a nat- 
uralism which clamored for relentless honesty in 
art—the world seen nakedly, like truth herself, 
but through the colored glasses of the lyric 
artist. 

“Die Blechschmiede,’ which has now been 
given its final form, is a work on which Holz has 
been polishing and filing for years. A subscrip- 
tion edition was issued in 1917; this new one, 1s- 
sued in 1921, by the Sybillen Verlag, Dresden, 
is, for the present, “final.” A first short draft 
was published in 1902. The full title is as fol- 
lows: 


162 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


THE TINSMITHY 
or 
the turned-over, churned-over, spurned-over, yearned- 
over, Over-thrown, over-flown 
MARVELOUS WASTE-BASKET 
whose fateful, spiral, infernal, castaway, done-for snip- 
pets miraculously erect themselves, 
spectrally form ranks and columns 
and suddenly— 
hey-presto, the devil take it, 
hullabaloo— 
grow sound as pins once more, 
super-jolly and trebly alive. 
A grand 
lyric-dramatic, drastic, musical-pictorial, plastic 
phantastic, orgiastic 
TONE, SCENE 
and 
WORD MYSTERIUM. 
A Pandivinium or, if you like, a Pandemonium in five 
monumental 
Acts and four cerebral Interludes, in all nine parts, not 
to say metamorphoses, or even 
outrages 
according to 


the Nine Muses. 


The book, laden with such perilous stuff, such 
sulphurous song and headsman’s satire, is almost 
a tome in size and weight—five hundred and fif- . 


MP Rae eee i 
ee at ¥iop 


THE LAUGHING SYNTHESIS 163 


teen pages of large and spacious format. Holz 
has dedicated 


THIS BOOK 
of ultimate, 
laughing audacity, 
most polished malice, 
gayest grace, 


most sparkling anger, 
and deepest, 


profoundest, 
healthiest, 
most jocund, 
clearest, 
truest, most hilarious, 
not to say most godly, 


most mocking wisdom, 
to all his future, 


corporate, 
rationalistic, 
Interpreters, Exterpreters, 
Exegists, Mediaries, 
Cathechists, Experts, 
Glossarists, Marginalists 
and Commentators. 


In the original German most of the nouns and 
adjectives rhyme and the lilt flies trippingly as 
a rod along a row of bells. This title page and 
this dedication strike the note of mad, hurly- 


164 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


burly exuberance which immediately breaks forth 
from the book itself, like some door in a silent 
street suddenly opening on a tumultuous parlia- 
ment. It is a work of incomparable richness and 
fecundity, or vitality, screwing itself spirally to- 
ward the heights, then bursting in rocket-like cli- 
maxes. It bubbles, boils and effervesces, losing 
itself in wallows of words, satanic and arresting 
and burlesque words, clogged only by the pleth- 
ora of them—in cloud-fields of phantasy, in for- 
ests of digressions and discussions, all in flashing 
verse, and linked together by the colored light- 
nings of the poet’s wit. 

There are pages that are one blazon of bizarre 
typography, of philosophical grotesquerie, pages 
of nouns, pages of single, double, triple and 
quadruple adjectives, pages of proper names, 
many of them rhyming with a tinkling, madden- 
ing monotony, and marshaled and rigged in 
strange outlandish designs, making outline pat- 
terns on the papers, like skins nailed to a barn 
door—intended and extended outlines, crosses, 
spindles, and Christmas trees of text, weird skele- 
tons that cause the eyeball to dance and skip 
from longest line to shortest word. These 
chains or textures of words seem to have been 
torn from dictionary and thesaurus and flung 









THE LAUGHING SYNTHESIS 165 


into the book by handfuls. Yet each is well, 
often adroitly and subtly, chosen, and causes us 
to marvel at the richness, flexibility and plastic 
nature of a language capable of being pulled 
and molded into so many new and by no means 
unnatural coinages. We are dazed by a wealth 
of wit, usually spontaneous, sometimes naive, 
coruscating like a cascade of gems down a tin- 
kling chute. Over all rolls a humor, blithe, 
mocking, ribald, gross, obscene, which sometimes 
stretches itself and belches in Rabelaisian 
breadth, then loses and swallows itself in quag- 
mires that seem void and formless yet are packed 
to the brimming edge with appalling exuberance 
of life. There is an insolent, yet compelling in- 
evitability about the argument, and the language 
and the verses bristle with epigrammatic point. 
And with the exclamation point, no less—if the 
handsome fraktur type of this book was set by 


become necessary in the fonts. And the inten- 
sity and speed with which the ringing verses and 
tripping staves are lashed along, cause the book 
to fume, to foam and to quiver. Steam rises and 
sweat falls; this book is actually a stage. 

In his astonishingly brief foreword of forty- 
one words to this astonishingly profuse and dif- 


* Coe AEA COP eee ee 
ne 5 [teh a ALN Ue 
{ 


166 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS | 


fuse work, Holz avows his spiritual kinship with 
Heine, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift. He might 
have added Pope whose ribaldries in the ‘“Dun- 
ciad” find a frequent echo here. An index of 
fifteen solid pages gives us the names, running 
like ordinary text from left to right, of the Ac- 
tors, Gods, Voices, Choruses, Allegories, Abstrac- 
tions, Phantasms, Public Characters, etc.,—names 
ancient and modern which shoot up like flying 
fish out of the tumultuous, white-capped currents 
of the lines. 

“The Tinsmithy” is a travesty of human life 
and history. 

One is bidden to imagine a monumental Punch 
and Judy show on a marble stage, with the 
towering hermes of the nine muses glittering 
against the fabulous blue, and hundreds of thou- 


sands of spectators stretched and piled in endless 


consecutive rows of seats. There is a welter of 
actors who come and go, like the figures on a 
revolving target. Among the chief and most per- 
sistent are the Author, the Gentleman in the 
Thirties, Apollonius Golgotha, Persons in the 
Audience, the Stage Manager, Puck, the Gentle- 
man over Fifty, Dafnis, the Poet, One in the 
Gallery, the Impresario, etc. There are all sorts 
of adjectival personalities, such as the Comfort- 





THE LAUGHING SYNTHESIS 167 


able-reticent-satisfied-One, the Suspiciousl y-delib- 
erate-fearsome-One, etc. The acts, interrupted 
by stormy interludes and prologues, unroll as 
follows: 

Act One: “The Battle of the Skalds, Bards, 
Minstrels, etc.” Allegro marciale resoluto quasi 
polifonia pomposa bombastica. 


In the sweet cerulean marvel 

of our virgin Poesy, 

Prose, our senile mother, plunged 
Her didactic lengthy beak, 

And the daughters of the Olympian 
Are degraded to mere jockies 

By each rascal wight whose paltry 
Badly glued and wheezy lyre 
Hums with but a single gut— 


is a bit of blank verse pounded forth by the 
Pegasus Keeper behind the drawn curtain. 

Act Two: “The Modern Walpurgis Night.” 
Fuga furiosa infernale quasi grottesca lasciva im- 
petuosa. Panorama audacieux satanique. A 
Witches’ medley, dance and hocus-pocus. 

Act Turee: “The Isles of the Blest.” 
Scherzo appasionato grazioso quasi pastorale bac- 
canale erotico. An earthly Paradise of loves and 
loving. All the passions of literature, the large 
and the little, wind their way across the stage, 


168 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Diana, Mars and Venus, Dido, Penthesilea, 
Tanit, Sappho, Tristan and Isolde, Messalina, 
Paganini, with manv moderns, among them Walt 
Whitman 


. the Yankee and reformer 
Riding a whirling ventilator. 


Act Four: “The Harp Hung upon the 
Drooping Willows by the Waters of Babylon.” 
Adagio grave divoto quasi lamento amoro lagri- 
moso. An accusatory, auto-confessional act, 
philosophic and melancholic. 

Act Five: “The High Court of Judgment. 
The Symbolic Heroic.” Finale crudele adirato 
quast stretta tumultuosa prectpitevollessima. 
Croquis tragiqgue rapide. ‘The Chorus rallies 
round the author and chants: 


Pale shimmer the stars, black rears the pine. 
Carry the torch for your brothers in line; 
Think not of the past! 
Think of the cats’ eyes sparkling in darkness, 
Think of the beasts that crouch there in starkness! 
The joy was not fast— 
Think not of the past. 
Think of thy sword and its whirring sound, 
And let thy heart not stop 
When on thy fist so clenched and round 
The red sparks drop! 








ie” ame 


~ 


THE LAUGHING SYNTHESIS 169 


Literary styles, schools and fashions are ridi- 
culed and many a shaft flies toward the well- 
known and the eminent. 


The Color Drunkard, thus: 


The fallow eve sits on her titan steed; 

Within the skies her castles burn and bleed; 
A thousand fires flicker on the flood 

And the black willows drip—with blood. 


The Neo-Romantic: 


The moon within the clouds—how vile! 
Though real, what a dearth of style! 

Au contraire, see what freshness flushes 
A moon in patent calf galoshes! 


Truth, the ‘“Decrinolined One,’ declaims: 


As Truth I hold thee naked as a rail 
Close to my mirror’s shine. 

Thou art a monstrous petrefact, 
A mummified porcupine. 


There are fiery discussions that swirl about 
the German Muse. The public takes an active 
part in these and in the massacre of the schools. 
There are attacks and counter-attacks by pundits, 
critics and creators. Solace is dropped like balm 
upon the Author by a few faithful adherents, 
Holz’s own followers, who sing: 


¥. “wf yea 4A Sa 
CNS Ve Ae 


170 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Exit! End! 4 bas le rideau! 
Others, too, were treated so. 

Dante, Cervantes were rich in pains, 
Kleist the great blew out his brains; 
Birger ?—what had he to choose ? 
Bobby Burns went down in booze. 

All of them knew strife and loss; 
Gogol crept and kissed the cross; 

Ibsen clung to all his orders; 
Strindberg’s mind flew o’er its borders; 
Cousin Isaac, Sally Cohn 

Harried Detlev Liliencron. 

Seek not to move us with your growl; 
Demand no special wine or fowl. 

Curse not when mud is flung your way; 
Be glad that you’re a wall—and stay. 





The final words of the Author (who is also 
at times the Gentleman over Fifty) are defiantly | 
flung before the tribunal: 


I lay this shock-haired Peter book 
Here on this green table—look! 
Dissolved in awe, my noodle bare is 
And bows to all contemporaries. 


Though many this same book reveals, 
‘Tis not a book with seven seals, 
Every word and every case 

Stands adroitly in its place. 





THE LAUGHING SYNTHESIS 171 


Your goods are damaged, never whole, 
The cockroach houses in your soul— 
To all your windy moil and wheeze, 


I am the Laughing Synthesis! 


That is perhaps, the inmost secret of this wild 
bedlam of a book and the mysticism that partly 
enwraps it. It 1s Arno Holz’s attempt to com- 
pose a Profane Comedy, to reduce all culture, 
all history, all art and all human society to some- 
thing that may be brightened and interpreted by 
the Comic Spirit. A modern Thyrsites in the 
Temple. History and Mythology deprived of 
robe, mask and kothurnus and reduced to the 
pitifully human, sometimes to the bestial, the 
gods made laughable in the toils of the passion 
with which they have befuddled men, heroes sub- 
ject to the animalism that whips the earth like 
a top. A panorama, a peep-show, a circus—a 
stage on which are focused pitiless, wise and 
sardonic eyes, the eyes of the disillusioned 
Holz himself—a kind of lyrical Professor 
Teufelsdréckh. Into the satiric-scurrilous, the 
sarcastic-salacious, the exclamatory-invective, 
the riotous indecency of this or that stave, 
creeps the low, groaning note of this disillusion 
at the heart of the poet. Not even the exuber- 


Lt er 


; . ‘ 


172 THE ARTS IN THE NEW GERMANY 





ance that overcrows the work, not the intoler- 
- able torrential rush of the language, the league- 
long drawing-out of linked agonies of speech, the 
bleated amorphisms of incessant refrain and rep- 
etition, can dim or tire the blazing, coruscating 
prose and verse which dazzle the brain as a pile 
of unset gems the eyes. The lavish learning 
shown—this, too, is Rabelaisian—there are 
mountains of allusion, as in Montaigne or Sir 
Thomas Browne. 

No echo of the war rings plangently from 
“The Tinsmithy,” no shot is heard, no streak of 
poison gas crawls across the scene. Some day 
this world convulsion may be compressed into a 
number of scornful quatrains. ‘The Tin- 
smithy” is for the greater part untranslatable, a 
grandiose monstrosity in literature that requires 
for its full comprehension a soul and a mind 
drenched in the spirit of the Gothic and shot 
through with the golden threads of the pagan 
world. And the spectator who sits down to this 
gallimaufry of a feast must also be annealed in 
the crystal furnaces of the Renaissance. He 
must also be an Ultimate Modern and have swal- 
lowed and digested the greater part of the things 
called Culture and Civilization, and then given 
them up again in disgust—as one who grows sea- 








THE LAUGHING SYNTHESIS 173 


sick from the pitching deck and the swinging 
stars. Such meat and wine are too strong for 
our own literature, but this Gargantuan magnum 
opus stands and sparkles, a cosmic-lyrical boiler 
factory, the tinny thunder of which is softened 
by a Loreley-like music that rings above the 
pother. 


XI 





ACTIVISTIC ARCHITECTURE 


Many have been the efforts of the architect- 
creator of our day to form or even to formulate 
an architecture which might be something greater 
and truer than the existing anomalies and an- 
achronisms. The old forms of bygone ages and 
civilizations not only survived as shells and skel- 
etons, but they imposed themselves upon us ty- 
rannically as norms and standards and dominated 
all architecture with a kind of mock life. 

Every building erected according to tradition 
became a kind of prison in which new forms, 
births, and possibilities perished. And one of 
the great failures of our modern civilization be- 
came monumentally visible—the inability of our 
culture to produce a vital architecture, bred of 
the spirit of our time, a concentration and a crys- 
tallization of the soul of an epoch or of a people. 

A visitor from ancient ages would be lost 
amidst our machines and the other products of 

174 





ACTIVISTIC ARCHITECTURE 175 


our civilization—but our buildings would still 
be familiar to him—poor copies or bloodless 
simulacra of his own. 

The skyscraper is both an adaptation and an 
evolution—or rather an aggregation. It is the 
multiple stratification of the story, a liberation, 
it is true, but almost wholly in the engineering 
of altitude, the result of abnormal local and lat- 
eral pressure. 

It is the forced fruit of financial speculation 
rather than artistic inspiration—it has nothing 
in common with the unconscious forces that de- 
termine true architecture. In its forms it is still 
pent within the trammels of tradition. A new 
liberation, a new reformation becomes necessary if 
our art of building is not to sink into greater 
and greater sterility. 

There have been signs of a period of transition, 
of hints and prophecies in the work of such men 
as Olbrich, van de Velde, Wright, Mackintosh 
and Poelzig, but the entire mass was still too 
rigid, too frozen to permit of the efflorescence 
of a new spirit of building. 

Then came the war, the great destroyer of 
forms—human, national, and cultural. This 
meant annihilation to much that was already life- 


176 THE ARTS IN THE NEW GERMANY 


less and soulless. It meant freedom of space 
-and action for new forces, thoughts, and buried 
aspirations. 

The war has thus brought a new vision to 
many a young architect in Europe. The war 
performed in spirit what Marinetti the 
Futurist in a ruthless anarchism of destruc- 
tion longed to perform in actual deed when he de- 
clared war against the palaces and churches of 
Venice. 

Among those aspirants toward a new architec- 
ture who proceed most scientifically with the syn- 
thesis of new forms, we must reckon Erich Men- 
delsohn. His inventions and innovations are in- 
spired by a great revolutionary force, by vision, 
intuition and structural logic. A short time ago 
he exhibited a number of his designs and models 
and these aroused intense interest and speculation 
among the architects of his own land and their 
foreign colleagues. 

The work of this young builder seems to point 
the way which architectural development will 
pursue in the future. His break with the past 
is definite and clear. His creations determine 
their own forms out of the nature of modern 
building materials, out of function, use and ex- 


pediency. 





Paw 2 ee eS ae ee ee 


: 
| 





ACTIVISTIC ARCHITECTURE 177 


From the clarity and simplicity of their struc- 
tural organization, the strength and purity of the 
architectonic will which they display, and the 
inherent power as expressed in their control of 
great masses, we obtain the impression that we 
are face to face with a new conception, a new 
philosophy of the feeling for space—that sub- 
limated sense all great architects must possess. 

Something of the austerity and inevitability 
of that law which dominates the monuments of 
the great original epochs of architecture—the 
Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral—and de- 
crees that these are to be understood only in the 
light of their constructional conditions, is visible 
in these new shapes. 

This law is simple: the external form is to be 
conceived merely as flesh and skin in relation to 
the structure of the skeleton. 

Thus the appearance of steel as a new build- 
ing material was bound to postulate a new 
method of architectural expression, precisely as 
the architectural system of direct support and 
load, the figure T as expressed in classic archi- 
tecture, and of pillar and vault as expressed in 
Gothic architecture, brought forth the organic 
architectural form inherent in the material and 
the method. 


178 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


This ought to be a natural and logical con- 
clusion, after we have seen how wonderfully the 
energies latent in iron have expressed themselves 
in mechanics, in machinery, in the means of 
transportation—and in war. 

It is chiefly because the possibilities of iron 
and steel have been exploited in a mechanical 
instead of in an esthetic sense (owing to the su- 
premacy of the stationary or the movable ma- 
chine), that the architect has failed to take ad- 
vantage of the great opportunities presented to 
him by this material. 

He has been untrue to the very soul of archi- 
tecture and has confined himself to draping and 
garnishing first-rate works of engineering with 
all kinds of nondescript decorative lumber and 
inconsequentialities. 

He has distorted and repressed the freedom 
and the “reach” of steel by crushing and con- 
fining it within the rigid limits of some cubicular 
scheme or system derived from the past. 

It was necessary, as I have said, that this en- 
tire world of congealed and petrified tradition 
be convulsed to its roots—that all human rela- 
tionships be shaken, strained, and shattered be- 
fore this fabric could be freed from the bondage 
of the merely expedient and the calculative, as 


” 








“vipa cas 
ACTIVISTIC ARCHITECTURE 179 


well as from the tutelage of decadent efforts at 
a renaissance of renaissances. 

The means by which enlightenment came were 
brutal, mad, and ruthless, but the Great Cat- 
aclysm has proved to us that architecture as a 
modern art must begin precisely at that point at 
which the nineteenth century imagined its task 
had already been completed. 

It is significant that Erich Mendelsohn’s basic 
principle of a new language and of a new libera- 
tion for architecture came to him shortly before 
the catastrophe which engulfed the hollow and 
jerry-built structure of our civilization. 

The young architect had already seen some 
fragments of his visions realized in steel, glass, 
and concrete, and the music of new forms erect 
itself into a harmonious system. ‘These antici- 
pations have now been overtaken by the new 
tendencies and the new aspirations in all fields 
of intellectual and spiritual activity. 

The load in construction was no longer to be 
directly related to the support or the pillar, but 
was able to distribute and diffuse itself over great 
areas, or concentrate itself on small foc. 

The wall was no longer to be subject to the 
immutable law of the perpendicular. If the 
architect chooses to slant a wall outward like a 


180 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


limb of the V, in order, say, to capture more sun- 
- light, steel and concrete remain loyal to him. 
Steel and concrete give men a freedom in 
architecture almost analogous to that which na- 
ture gives to many of her forms. 
Thick glass, clear and colored, for roofs or 
walls or floors, opens up unconjectured vistas of 





Fic. 1% An AERODROME 


luminosity and crystalline splendor, causing a 
house to vibrate with light, to unfold like a jewel 
of many facets, of dynamics and design. 
“Movement” and mass are given a new signif- 
icance when contemplated from the viewpoint of 
Einstein’s theory of relativity. 

It will prove interesting to analyze a few of 
these astonishing yet organic structures, most of 
them industrial. 

The Aérodrome (Fig. 1) is the central unit of 








ACTIVISTIC ARCHITECTURE 181 


a large and comprehensive plant. Here the 
component forms of the structure are clearly co- 
ordinated—the airship halls, the hangars, and 
the workshops. The construction of the cen- 
tral shed reveals a bold and majestic use of the 
girder, giving a gesture of great liberty and 
power. 

This is an earlier design of Mendelsohn’s and 
discloses an almost puritanic use of material in 
relation to the skeleton of the building. The 
building itself seems to resist the accretion of the 
slightest superfluity. 

His later designs, equally grandiose in concep- 
tion, are based upon a greater compactness, a 
more rounded and sculpturesque expression—the 
edifices seem eloquent of an intense and tenacious 
experience. The central core of the structure or 
group of structures now rises tower-like; great 
arches and bays surround it and rivet themselves 
to the whole or mount like terraces toward the 
dominant block. 

In the structures of the classical historical 
period, the body or bulk of the building remains 
entirely passive, dead masses resting in ponder- 
ous inertness on their foundations. But in this 
new architecture—as we may see in the example 
of the Boxing and Packing Establishment (Fig. 


RPT ir Nati sg Att es les Ram 


182. NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


2), the vertical lines and masses impart a kind of 
driving force or impetus to the separate bulks 
and give movement to them. 

The lines then flow and mount and leap higher 





Fic. 2. BoxING AND PACKING ESTABLISHMENT 


until the entire complex is given architectural ac- 
tivity and tension—the whole an interplay of 
bending, rising, superincumbent, and protuber- 
ant “tracts.” 

The architect of the future will not be limited 
by his material nor cursed by the blight of mere 
utilitarianism. His phantasy will not be borne 
down by the weight of huge ashlars nor the break- 
ing point of a stone lintel or a brick arch. 

Material is merely a premise, a means whereby 
the artist may achieve freedom, realize his pur- 








ACTIVISTIC ARCHITECTURE 183 


pose, and find incentives for ever new audacities. 

The architect will proceed in part like the 
sculptor who has made his model and is about to 
cast it in bronze or plaster. ‘The architect will 





See aeons me _ 
ow A ATT, WO NNN 


Fic. 3. FAacrory ror Optica INSTRUMENTS 


shape his matrix in ribs of steel and casings of 
wood and cast the children of his fancy in en- 
during concrete. 

For example the Factory for Optical Instru- 
ments (Fig. 3) has become an actual monolith. 
We have the powerful surrounding base rings of 
the mounting or assembling shops, the turrets 
of brilliant glass for the mechanical workshops 
in which the most delicate instruments are made, 
the tracts of the staircases and elevators between 
the turrets, the offices and mailing rooms—the 


Ee ee ee ee 


184 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


whole a live organism of concrete, steel and 
glass, pulsating with the currents of modern in- 
dustry. 

The masses of the walls are no longer fettered 
to the traditional form of a four-cornered surface 
—one of the faces of an eight-cornered cube—to 
be cut up into doors and windows. 

No, the walls themselves have become a func- 
tion; their openings are no longer limited to pur- 
poses of light, communication or ventilation. 
The glass bays of these towers are “gates of 
light,” each an apex, a culmination, a pole to 
which all the other members are subordinated. 

The classic principle of load and support, as 
has already been pointed out, had for its goal the 
balance and repose of all the various masses. 
But in the structure of the future the masses are 
to overcome gravity and inertia and find their 
centres or cores of energy within themselves. 

The examples shown here have been entirely 
industrial—but the next step, the creation of the 
home or the sacerdotal edifice, depends merely 
upon the creative instinct accepting its inspira- 
tion from the message or the purpose of such a 
building. 

It is thus with The House of Friendship, (Fig. 





, 
: 
. 
3 


QE aS 


as 
> 
os 





ACTIVISTIC ARCHITECTURE 185 


4) acrystalline, polychrome, cathedral-like struc- 
ture, radiant and luminous. 

Great Halls of the People are to rear them- 
selves on city summits or outlying eminences, the 





Fic. 4. THE House oF FRIENDSHIP 


religion of peace and international understanding 
is to erect its domes. 

Color in masses or in line, broad bands of 
white or black or gold outlining colored walls or 
crestings, as well as a studied use of metals, will 
serve to give a still greater vitality and beauty 
to the new architecture. 

The intuitive element in building plays its part 
here. ‘The end in view will always produce its 


186 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


own form if the architectonic instinct be properly 


experienced, for once form in all its universality 
has been liberated from the dark secrecies of be- 
ing and becoming, then all its inflections are but 
as reflexes of the same creative will that recog- 
nizes the law and brings it into play. 

It is clear that these examples are but the first 
tentative efforts toward the materialization of a 
new architecture. Unconsciously the rococo and 
the bizarre may still operate in them. 

They stand in the same relation to the fully 
developed or final form that the first automobile 
or aéroplane bore to its heirs and successors. A 
pathfinder has found a way out of the architec- 
tural impasse. 

In the accompanying sketches Erich Mendel- 
sohn has merely given visible form of his prin- 
ciples. 

These drawings are mere notes, data, fixations 
of compositions suddenly conceived, not out of 
the air, but as projections of definite plans. 
They are abstractions which await their birth in 
matter. 

Owing to the immense difficulties which beset 
the building trades the projects upon which the 
young innovator is at present engaged are few, 








ACTIVISTIC ARCHITECTURE 187 


but in these few his ideas are already emerging 
triumphantly. 

They prove that the artist, the master-builder, 
is not defunct; that the true creator need only 
place his ear to the giant heart of the epoch and 
link himself to the chain of its energies in order 
to find those forms in which the Age would ex- 
press itself. 


XII 
THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 


Gerorc KalsER is a phenomenon, a concentration, 
a compression of the cultural, industrial and ar- 
tistic forces of our day. ‘These forces, working 
first upon and then within him, have now been 
released, under intense pressure as through a 
valve, and expanded into a new, authentic and 
expressionistic form of dramatic art. 

This art and the form in which it confronts us, 
is still so strange, so disturbing, that we overlook 
the fact that it is the logical resultant, the inevi- 
table evolution of our present-day civilization. 

If we place our ears against the latticework of 
these metallic lines, we shall hear the hum, the 
vibrations of the engine that drives our epoch 
onward. 

In other words, Kaiser has found a finished 
dramatic form, a conventional stage speech for 
our age, or perhaps only for our decade, so noisy, 
yet so inarticulate. 

The plays of Georg Kaiser and the matter and 


the speech of his plays are so anticipant, so filled 
188 











THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 189 


with the spirit of To-morrow, that we forget that 
they are compact of To-day—that he has precipi- 
tated the mountainous materialism, and also the 
planetary dreams of our epoch—as the prophetic 
poet crystallizes an age into a play or a poem. 

He is so intensely cosmopolitan in his philos- 
ophy, so German in the universality of his world 
ideals, that we—Colossus-of-Rhodes-like—must 
have our mental feet planted in both hemispheres 
to be able to realize that this man, this poet with 
the close-cropped head, sleepy eyes and bored, 
unintellectual look, has found or rather invented 
a form of expression, of verbal and dramatic dy- 
namics—which should have been the esthetic ex- 
pression and distillation of our own mechanistic 
American civilization! Here, I say, in the work 
of this modern European dramatist, America has 
found its mechanical, its ideological and its 
idealistic apotheosis. It may not be the America 
of to-day, but it is America as the antithesis of 
Europe. 

Georg Kaiser is the singer, or rather the artis- 
tic exploiter of the Cyclopean forces that exploit 
the world and human life—money, industry, ma- 
chines, mechanics and motor energies. 

His plays, in their structure and in the ratchet 
and gear-work of the surcharged dialogue that 


190 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


drives the action along, have something of the re- 
lentless will and directness of machines. But 
this Magdeburger of forty-six is also the prophet 
of a great, solar human love, fructifying anew 
the sandy, sucked-out earth, the smoke-blasted 
heath of industrialism, into a blessed garden. It 
is a love that shall convert the slag-heaps of 
civilization into maternal fields, erasing the sul- 
phurous fogs from the skies, as with a sponge, 
and letting the gonfalon of a new hope fly there, 
seeking to convert the fiery world sirocco in which 
only Cyclops, slaves and salamanders can breathe, 
into a climate fit for a new race, rejuvenated, re- 
generated. 

He has built up his own shipshape system of 
ethics, his own moralities, and he has the courage 
and ruthlessness of his own ideas and his own 
extraordinary talents. And also intellectual per- 
versities and blind spots. 

A short time ago this gifted man, whose plays 
were acted throughout Germany and in most of 
the adjoining lands, succumbed to a half-artistic, 
half-social craving for luxuries even greater than 
his liberal royalties allowed him. His arrest 
and arraignment in a Munich court was one of 
the sensations of Germany. He was charged 
with having made illegal use of the carpets and 





oe tii Se ei a 
a Ef, 0 
oes | 


THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 191 


furniture of a handsome villa he had rented at 
Starnberger See. 

With cold, imperturbable consequentiality 
from his own premises, he set up the thesis that in 
comparison with the spiritual and esthetic values, 
the edification, which he had given the public, 
nay, the whole world, the disposal of a few rugs 
or bits of furniture, belonging temporarily to 
a unit of that public, was absolutely negligible! 

The court refused to acknowledge the thesis 
that because Kaiser had done great work, he was 
also free to commit petty deeds—and enforced 
the law, while taking due account of the spirit 
that should prevail over it, by making the sen- 
tence light. 

Kaiser has invented and built up, almost as 
one invents and builds some scientific apparatus, 
a new technique, a new convention of the mod- 
ern drama. Some of his early literary origins 
may be traced to Carl Sternheim, but this world 
upon which he lifts the curtain is indisputably 
his own. He has made the genius of the age vo- 
cal by finding this dramatic form for him, freed 
him from matter by giving him this formal prison 
of art. 

He shows us a world of infinite mechanical in- 
tricacy, the whole globe one panting organism, 


192 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


_ like a factory, transcendently scientific, the whole 
of mankind divided into masters and serfs, one 
throbbing, quivering entity of pitiless work— 
reduced by him to a few shining and singing 
symbols. 

He has broken into the conventional speech 
and gesture of the stage. His characters, even 
those of heroic, melodramatic will and dimen- 
sions, are puppets in the thrall of huge, over- 
shadowing powers—mobilized machines, world 
organizations, leagues, industries, trusts. 

The Fates and the Pities are grimly, darkly 
imminent in these dramas—eternal alternations of 
Salvation and Doom—the human will finding a 
way out of the émpasse—to be blocked and 
thwarted again by human folly. His characters 
are stripped of the personal and sublimated into 
types, abstractions of human will, thought or 
emotion—the Gentleman in White, the Billion- 
aire’s Son, the Daughter, Engineer, First Gentle- 
man in Black, Officer, Mother, Workman, Yel- 
low Figure, Blue Figure, etc. Their speech is 
stripped to the utmost; it is hard and hammered 
like metal, a skeleton speech. It is the stenog- 
raphy of thought, a telegraphic tongue, signals of 
mental processes, flashing up from the switch- 
board of never-resting brains. It is a speech 








THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 193 


abrupt, staccato, shorn of every redundancy, 
often dropping the very articles before the words 
—intensely packed and compressed with the ker- 
nel, the extract of meaning—expressionistic. 
This sometimes brings about a certain obscurity, 
so that all the sharp, harsh angles of the language 
enhalo themselves with a glow of mysticism— 
like a bar of superheated steel in a rose-red or 
incandescent aura. And a new music rises from 
this swift, percussive dialogue. 

The gestures are suited to the words. The ac- 
tors move and gesticulate with abrupt, studied, 
mechanical, almost marionette-like movements, 
reminding one at times of the two-dimensional 
profile figures on Egyptian or Assyrian friezes. 
Yet these gestures run the gamut of all the pas- 
sions. They become furious and formidable, 
stormy as hammer blows, as when the Workmen 
and Workwomen speak from the iron pulpit in 
the gloom of the wrecked machine-hall—they be- 
came mellow and plastic, as when the Son of the 
Billionaire delivers his modern Sermon on the 
Mount amidst a chaos of gigantic concrete slabs 
like upheaved gravestones—upon the ruins of his 
work. 

Let us take of the sixteen plays which Kaiser 
has written—among them, “The Burghers of 





194 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Calais,” “King Cuckold,” ‘The Sorina,” ‘“Eu- 
ropa,” “From Morn to Midnight,” ‘The Coral,” 
“The Fire in the Opera House,” ‘Hell, Way, 
Earth’—the most characteristic and best-known, 
“Gas” (Part I). This strange drama is a sequel 
to “Die Koralle’’—a tale of titanic conflicts be- 
tween the autocratic man of millions, a hero of 
Napoleonic traits, a masterly criminal, yet ca- 
pable of unbendable principles and noblest sacri- 
fices, and of his son consumed with an altruistic 
passion. The demon, the deus in machina of 
the play, “Gas,” is a new chemical invention, a 
subtle gas with which all the engines of all the 
world are driven. The climax is a cataclysmic 
explosion which not only disrupts the great cen- 
tral station, but the whole social fabric. 

But mankind will not listen to the voice of the 
repentant inventor, will not return to a happy 
pastoral life and let the gas rest, as the altruistic 
reformer exhorts them to do. The Engineer, the 
man of action and “progress,” triumphs and the 
world spins once more to the raving tempo of 
Gas. This desperate and impetuous drama is 
linked to the destinies of three generations, 
though each play is rounded in itself. In Part 
II the Grandson of the Billionaire’s Son, the 
barefooted, rough-clad Billionaire Workman, 








THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 195 


leads the forces of labor against Mammon at the 
close. The red-glass sphere trembles in his hand, 
ready to be flung amidst the works and convert 
the gas into poison gas—the one self-devastating 
weapon left him against the artillery of the be- 
sieging powers. A Judgment Day for Human- 
ity. A Yellow Figure in a gas helmet stalks 
over bleached skeletons—Dzes Ire—Resurrec- 
tion! 

Kaiser has also, in collaboration with Karl 
Jakob Hirsch of the Volksbihne, Berlin, devised 
his scenery in harmony with his play. Here, too, 
rigidity, stark economy, almost barrenness reign. 
The first scene of “Gas” (Part I) reveals a vast 
square white room, the office of the Billionaire’s 
Son. The rear wall is entirely of glass in huge 
squares. To right and left on the walls are great 
charts with tables and diagrams in black and 
white. Two desks, two or three chairs of austere 
design await the action. 

Through the glass wall, in a murky violet 
light, we see the steep and thronged shapes of 
great chimney stacks from which flame and 
smoke pour in straight lines. Faint bursts of 
music come and go. A young secretary with 
violent orange hair sits at the smaller desk. 

Enters noiselessly the Gentleman in White, a 





196 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


strange whimsical phantom figure entirely in 
white, including his chalk-white face. He sur- 
veys the room, tiptoes toward the Secretary, 
touches him upon the shoulder. The following 
dialogue—which I have permitted to run on to 
the close of the first act—ensues. Question and 
answer ricochet back and forth like projectiles. 
The tempo of the play is at once communicated 
to the audience, its haste, the brooding, nerve- 
racking tension of impending disaster: 


GENTLEMAN IN WHITE: Music? 

SECRETARY: (Turns up a startled face.) 

GENTLEMAN IN WHITE: (Listens to sounds from 
overhead, nods.) Valse. 

SECRETARY: How do you happen— ? 

GENTLEMAN IN WHITE: Quite casually. A certain 
noiselessness—achieved by rubber soles. (Seats him- 
self in char before desk, crosses legs.) The Chief ?— 
Busy? Upstairs? 

SECRETARY: What do you want? 

GENTLEMAN IN WHITE: A party—a dance? 

Secretary: (In growing haste and confusion.) 
There’s a wedding—overhead. 

GENTLEMAN IN WHITE: (With pointing finger.) 
The Chief—or— ? 

SECRETARY: ‘The Daughter—and the Officer. 

GENTLEMAN IN WuitE: Then, of course, he can’t be 
seen at present—the Chief ? 

SECRETARY: We have no chief—here— 








THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 197 


GENTLEMAN IN WHITE: (Switching round.) In- 
teresting! Assuming that you are not too deeply en- 
gaged in delicate calculations—the wage schedules 
there— ? 

SECRETARY: We have no wage schedules—here/ 

GENTLEMAN IN WuiteE: That piles up the interest. 
That touches the core of things. (Pointing through 
window.) ‘This gigantic establishment going full blast 
—and no Chief—no wage schedules— ? 

SECRETARY: We work—and we share! 

GENTLEMAN IN WuiTE: (Pointing to wall.) The 
diagrams? (Rising and reading table.) Three divi- 
sions. Up to thirty years, Scale One. Up to forty 
years, Scale Two. Over forty years, Scale Three. A 
simple bit of arithmetic. Profit-sharing according to 
age. (Jo SecrETARy.) An invention of your Chief— 
who refuses to be a chief? 

SECRETARY: Because he does not wish to be richer 
than others! 

GENTLEMAN IN Wuite: Was he ever rich? 

SECRETARY: He is the Son of the Billionaire! 

GENTLEMAN IN WuiteE: (Smiling.) So he ad- 
vanced to the very periphery of wealth and then returned 
to its centre—to its core— And you work? 

SECRETARY: Every man works to his utmost! 

GENTLEMAN IN WuiTE: Because you get your share 
of the total earnings ? 

SecreTARY: And that’s why we work harder here 
than anywhere else on earth! 

GENTLEMAN IN WuiteE: I suppose you produce 
something worth such an effort ? 





198 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


SECRETARY: Gas! 

GENTLEMAN IN WuitTE: (Blows through his hol- 
lowed hand.) 

SECRETARY: (Excited.) Haven’t you heard of the 
gas we produce? 

GENTLEMAN IN WHITE: (Also shows excitement.) 

SECRETARY: Coal—and water-power are out of date. 
This new source of energy drives millions of machines 
at super-speed. We furnish the power. Our gas feeds 
the industry of the entire world! 

GENTLEMAN IN WHITE: (At window.) Day and 
night—fire and smoke ? 

SECRETARY: We have attained the acme of our 
achievement ! 

GENTLEMAN IN WhuitTE: (Returning.) Because 
poverty is abolished ? 

SECRETARY: Our intensive efforts create—create! 

GENTLEMAN IN WuiTeE: Because profits are shared? 

SECRETARY: Gas! 

GENTLEMAN IN Wuirte: And suppose sometime the 
gas—should— 

SEcRETARY: The work must go on—not a moment’s 
pause! We are working for ourselves—not for the 
pockets of others. No loafing—no strikes. The work 
goes on without a pause. There will always be gas! 

GENTLEMAN IN WuiTE: And suppose sometime the 
gas should—explode? 

SECRETARY: (Stares at him.) 

GENTLEMAN IN WuitEe: What then? 

SEcRETARY: (Speechless.) 

GENTLEMAN IN WHITE: (Breathes the words di- 





THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 199 


rectly into his face.) The White Horror! (Rising to 
full height, listening to sounds overhead.) Music. 
(Halting half way to door.) Valse. (Goes out, si. 
lently.) 

SECRETARY: (Jn growing consternation, finally seizes 
telephone, almost screaming.) The Engineer! (His 
eyes dart back and forth between the doors to right and 
left.) 

[Enter Encinerr from right, in dress suit. 

ENGINEER: What— 

[Enter Worxman from left, greatly excited, in white 
blouse. | 

SECRETARY: (Pointing with outstretched arm to 
Workman.) There—! 

ENGINEER: (Zo Workman.) Are you looking for 
me ? 

Workman: (Surprised.) I was just coming to re- 
port to you. 

ENGINEER: (Jo Secretary.) But you had already 
telephoned me! 

SECRETARY: Because— 

ENGINEER: Did you receive a report? 

Secretary: (Shakes head, points to WorKMaANn.) 
This man— 

ENGINEER: Has just come. 


SECRETARY: —was bound to come! 
ENGINEER: (Somehow disquieted.) What has hap- 
pened ? 


Workman: The gas in the sight-tube shows color. 
ENGINEER: Color? 
Workman: It is still only a tinge. 


St? Ae. oes 
eg oe 


200 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


ENGINEER: Growing deeper? 

Workman: Visibly. 

ENGINEER: What color? 

Workman: A light rose. 

ENGINEER: Are you not mistaken? 

Workman: I have been watching it carefully. 

ENGINEER: How long? 

SECRETARY: (Impulsively.) Ten minutes? 

Workman: Yes. 

EncInEER: How do you know that ? 

SECRETARY: Wouldn’t it be best to ring up—up- 
stairs ? 

ENGINEER: (Telephones.) Engineer. Report from 
Central Station—sight-tube shows color. Ill inspect 
personally. (To Workman.) Come along. (Both 
go out.) 

SecrETARY: (Suddenly throws up his arms, then 
runs out screaming.) We're done for—done for! 
[Enter from right, Birttonatre’s Son—sixty years old 

—and OFFICER in red uniform. | 

Orricer: Is there any cause for serious alarm? 

Brittionarre’s Son: I am waiting for the Engineer’s 
report. Nevertheless I am glad you are both going. 
I wanted to say a word about the fortune which my 
daughter is bringing you. (Takes a book out of his 
writing-table.) 

Orricer: I thank you. 

BiLtionarre’s Son: You need not thank me. It is 
her mother’s money. It ought to be considerable. I 
have no mind for such things. 

OrrFicer: An officer is forced— 





ele tas sal ee 
< eek! ee 





THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 201 


Bituionaire’s Son: (Opening book.) Here is the 
amount of the funds and where they are deposited. 
Find an efficient banker and take his advice. It will be 
necessary. 

OrFiceR: (Reads; then speaks in amazement.) We 
shall certainly require a banker to manage all this! 

Bittionarre’s Son: Because the capital is a large 
one? [I did not mean it that way. 

OrricER: Please explain. 

BILtionairE’s Son: What you have now you have 
for the entire future. You must not expect anything 
from me. Not now and not later. I shall leave noth- 
ing. My principles are sufficiently well known—they 
must also be familiar to you. 

Orricer: It is not likely that we— 

BittionairE's Son: No one can tell. As long as 
money is piled up, money will go lost. Conditions 
based on money are always uncertain. I feel I must 
tell you this, so that later on I may feel no responsibil- 
ity. You have married the daughter of a workman—I 
am nothing more. I will not conceal from you the fact 
that I would rather that my daughter’s mother had not 
left her a fortune. But I exercise authority only in 
my own province, and I never attempt to force anyone 
into this. Not even my daughter. 

[Enter DaucHtER—in travelling dress—from right.| 
DaucuTerR: Why must we hurry off this way? 
OrFicer: (Kissing her hand.) Wow feverish you 

still are from the dance! . 

Bitiionarre’s Son: I should not like the marriage 
festival to end in a discord. (They start.) The danger 


Sat AS ee 
5 





202 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


can no doubt be averted. But it demands every possi- 
ble effort. 

DaucHTerR: (At window.) Below—in the works? 

BILLIONAIRES Son: I should not find time to say 
good-bye—later on. 

DaucuTer: Is it so very serious? 

OFFICER: Counter-measures have been taken. 

BILLIONAIRES Son: (Taking Daucuter’s hand.) 
Bon voyage. Be happy. To-day you have laid aside 
my name. That is no loss. I am a man of plain 
tastes. I cannot approach the splendor of your new 
name. Must you and all you are be extinguished in 
me—now that you are going? 

DavucutTer: (Looks at him questioningly.) 

OrrFicer: How can you say such a thing! 

Bittionarre’s Son: I cannot follow you in your 
world—a world of fallacies. 

DaucuTer: But I shall return. 

Brtuionaire’s Son: It is not likely that I can wait 
for a real return. (Adrupily.) I shall now ask the 
guests to leave. (He hisses her forehead. The Daucu- 
TER Stands as if deeply moved. He clasps the OFFICER’S 
hand. The Orricer leads the DAUGHTER out.) 

BILLionaIRE'S Son: (Telephones.) Tell the people 
in the drawing-room that a disturbance at the works ne- 
cessitates bringing the festivities to a close. It is 
advisable to leave the vicinity as quickly as possible. 
(The music ceases.) 

[Enter ENGINEER from left. A workman’s overalls 
cover his dress suit. He ts deeply agttated.| 

ENGINEER: (Gaspfing.) Report from Central Sta- 








THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 203 


tion—gas colors deeper every second. In a few minutes 
—at same rate of progress—it will be—a deep red! 

Bituionaire’s Son: Is anything wrong with the en- 
gines ? 

EncineEr: All working perfectly! 

BILLIONAIRE’s Son: Any trouble with the ingredi- 
ents ? 

ENGINEER: All ingredients, all!—tested before mix- 
ing! 

Biiiionarre’s Son: Where does the fault lie? 

ENGINEER: (Shaking from top to toe.) In—the 
formula! 

Bituionaires Son: Your formula—does—not— 
work out ? 

EncIneErR: My formula—does not—work out! 

BILLIONAIRE’s Son: Are you sure? 

ENGINEER: Yes! Now! 

BiLtionaire’s Son: Have you found the mistake? 

ENGINEER: No! 

BILLIONAIRE’s SON: Can’t you find it? 

ENGINEER: The calculation is—correct! 

Birtionarre’s Son: And yet the sight-tubes show 
color ? 

ENGINEER: (Throws himself into char before desk 
—yjerks his hand across sheet of paper.) 

BILLIONAIRES SON: Have the alarms been set go- 
ing ? 

ENGINEER: (Without pausing.) All the bells are 
pounding away. | 

Brtuionarre’s Son: Is there enough time to clear 
the works ? 


204 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 





ENGINEER: The lorries are whizzing from door to 
door. 

BILLIONAIRES Son: In good order? 

ENGINEER: In perfect order! 

BILLIONAIRES Son: (In terrible agitation.) Will 
all get out? 

ENGINEER: (Leaping to his feet, standing erect be- 
fore him.) I have done my duty—the formula is clear 
—without a flaw! 

Briuronaire’s Son: (Stunned.) You cannot find 
the error? : 

ENGINEER: Nobody can find it. Nobody! No ~— 
brain could reckon more carefully. ITve made the final 
calculation! 

BILLIonAIRE’s Son: And it does not work out? 

ENGINEER: It works out—and does not work out. 
We have reached the limit—works out and does not 
work out. Figures fail us—works out—yet does not 
work out. The thing sums itself up, and then turns 
against us—works out and does not work out! | 

BILLIONAIRES Son: The gas—? 

ENGINEER: It is bleeding in the sight-tube! Flood- 
ing past the formula—going red in the sight-glass. 
Floating out of the formula—taking the bit in its own 
teeth. I have done my duty. My head is quite clear. 
The impossible is going to take place—it cannot come 
—yet it is coming! 

Briuionarre’s Son: (Feeling for a chair.) We are 
helpless—delivered up to— 

ENGINEER: The explosion! 

[A terrible sibilance tears asunder the silence without. 





Ee a a a a) ee re ey area eee 





THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 205 


A grinding thunder bursts—the smokestacks crack and 
fall. A silence, empty and smokeless, ensues. The 
great glass windows rattle into the room in a cascade of 
fragments. | 

BiLuionaire’s Son: (Flattened against the wall— 
in a toneless voice.) The earth swayed— 

ENGINEER: Pressure of millions of atmospheres— 

BiLuionaire’s Son: All is silent—a grave. 

ENGINEER: Immense radius of devastation— 

BiLiionaire’s Son: Is any one still alive? 
[The door to left ts flung open—a WorkKMan—naked— 

Stained by the exploston—totters in.| 

Workman: Report from Shed Eight—Central— 
white cat bursts—red eyes torn open—yellow mouth gap- 
ing—humps up crackling back—grows round—snaps 
away girders—lifts up roof—bursts—sparks! Sparks! 
(Sztteng down in the middle of floor and striking about 
him.) Chase away the cat—Shoo! Shoo!— Smash 
her jaws—Shoo! Shoo!— Bury her eyes—they flame 
—Hammer down her back—hammer it down—thou- 
sands of fists! It’s swelling, swelling—growing fat— 
fatter—gas out of every crack—every tube! (Once 
more half erecting himself.) Report from Central— 
the white cat has—exploded! (He collapses and lies 
prone.) 

BILLIONAIRE’S SON: (Goes to him.) 

WorkMan: (Gropes with his hand.) 

Bittionaire’s Son: (Takes his hand.) 

Workman: (With a cry.) Mother! ... (Dies.) 

Bituionarre’s Son: (Bending low above him.) O 
man! O mankind! 


1, fon Os Ge 


206 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Thus, in the cosmos of Georg Kaiser, humanity 
is flung forward—‘“from catastrophe to catas- 
trophe.” 

The mechanism is cruel, as he exposes it, yet 
courage and hope live on. 

He knows that no sooner have the volcanoes of 
civilization and of the demonian human heart, 
oscillating between the poles of the beast and the 
god, quieted down, than the pathetic, antlike 
swarms are at it once more, rebuilding busily 
upon the still hot, quivering slopes of their be- 
loved A‘tna and Vesuvius. 

In a few years this activistic playwright, this 
virtuoso of a sublimated sensationalism, has writ- 
ten his own drama of ascent, triumph, downfall 
and rebirth. 

He has achieved a European reputation before 
which the English and even the French have 
capitulated. Yet, despite his German traits and 
message, there is in him, in his style and spirit 
and technique, the expression, the efflorescence of 
the American spirit. 

But it is the American spirit as this is seen 
idealized by a European artist, purged of its slag, 
of the trivial, the cynical and the ephemeral, and 
given power, voice, direction as an element in art 
—a higher dispensation than even the vision of 











THE DYNAMIC DRAMATIST 207 


our rhetoric-inebriated political prophets could 
compass. 

Thus Europe sees and exploits in us the things 
we do not see and cannot express and builds them 
into a style, an esthetic convention and a phi- 
losophy. 


XII 
THE INTENSIVE SHAKESPEARE 


JEERS may be shot at Germany’s apparently pre- 
sumptuous claims to “unser Shakespeare.” But 
if a true love of the poet, a love reverent and 
deeply rooted in the hearts of the entire people, 
if constant exploitation of the plays and new ex- 
periments in production, if translations that pul- 
sate with almost the power and beauty of the 
originals, give substance to her spiritual claim, 
something of that claim must be allowed. It is 
an anomaly, but no less a fact, that the greatest 
of English poets, neglected and ekeing out a spec- 
tral, semi-archzological, literary and tuitional ex- 
istence in English-speaking countries, reigns—a 
monarch of poetry in his proper realm, the stage 
—in another tongue and another land. 

An audacious experiment in the production of 
“Richard III’? has been made at the National 
Theatre in Berlin, under the initiative of its en- 
ergetic new Director, Leopold Jessner, and his 


Master of Decorations, Emil Pirchan. Jessner 
208 











THE INTENSIVE SHAKESPEARE 209 


has turned the stately and academic traditions of 
the former Theatre Royal inside out and let the 
winds of the revolution in art blow through the 
dusty flies. Besides which he is pinched by the 
lack of means and has made a virtue out of the 
rigid economy forced upon him. 

Ring up the curtain on his new and astonishing 
production of “Richard III.” This grim and 
gory old tragedy has undergone at his hands 
a strange stage metamorphosis. We are con- 
fronted, sometimes affronted, by an intensifica- 
tion of the play, by a new atmosphere and me- 
dium, based upon the dynamics of expressionistic 
art. The historical becomes abstract, the human 
focuses itself into the symbolic, the external 
world fades into an adumbration, space and the 
scene are reduced to the simplest common denom- 
inator. Costumes are resolved into masses of 
color. The poetry, the characters and the pas- 
sions remain dominant, but with a treble, a ten- 
fold force and meaning. It is indeed an expres- 
sionistic summary, but also a compressionistic 
one. ‘The forced essence, the quintessence of the 
play is the thing. This is activist, this is aggres- 
sive art. 

In this new version, Richard, the black core of 
these many tortured and rudely severed royal 


Oe Fe en a 
‘ il = eS ee 

S 

>] 


210 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


destinies, was acted by Fritz Kortner, a gifted 
young actor, one of Jessner’s discoveries. He 
is one who seems born to the part, blest for all 
such high malefactor’s roles by virtue of his dark 
and mobile features which he is able to twist into 
masks of satanic evil, craft and ferocity—a visage 
out of Tartarus, brightened only by the malefi- 
cent glint of basilisk eyes and a smile that seems 
like the reflex of lightning or the sheen of steel. 
Bareheaded, this Beelzebub limped through the 
play, clad in a black gabardine, split at the sides, 
unredeemed by frill or ruff, a short dagger in his 
simple belt. And yet it was not merely villainy 
incarnate that Kortner expressed, but the de- 
monic in the human, the relentless obsession, the 
implacable ambition bent upon realizing itself 
even though forced to mount rung by rung upon 
a ladder of corpses. 

After Richard has spoken his famous prologue 
before the curtain, this sweeps aside. A high 
stone wall is revealed stretching across the entire 
stage—gray, lowering, dumb, pierced in its cen- 
tre by a small portal. A second square wall, 
equally mute and brutal, rises above the first, its 
face set some distance back from the lower wall, 
giving a terrace for entrances en hawt, as, for ex- 
ample, Richard’s when communing with the 





THE INTENSIVE SHAKESPEARE 211 


priests, or for the nobles on their way to execu- 
tion. Above this second wall, outlining it, glares 
a narrow framework of sky—crimson, alive with 
foreboding and imminent murder, the atmosphere 
of blood in which the whole drama is plunged, 
the threat of doom that encompasses and op- 
presses the puppets of the butcher Gloucester. 
This bare wall, which has, however, little in 
common with the naked emptiness and apologetic 
poverty of the archaic Shakespearean background, 
repels at first by the pitiless monotony with which 
our eyes are battered against it scene after scene, 
with only trifling variations of lighting or minor 
accessories. But this impregnable, unmoving 
background soon fixes our attention with the 
greater force and directness upon the intensified 
word and the accentuated action. ‘The expres- 
sionism of the play forces its tribute from the 
increased impressionism of the audience. The 
gray-green wall becomes the world, a fragment — 
of the cosmos, Fate itself, inalienable, eternal. 
The royal women give their peculiar note of 
mourning to the drama. ‘They impress us as 
norns and sibyls, living monuments of sorrowing 
wifehood, motherhood and queenhood, upon 
whom recoils every blow dealt by the ruthless 
climber as he sweeps aside the human obstacles 


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212 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


that block his path to the throne. These women 
are like figures out of some biblical tapestry— 
fates helpless in the snare of a super-fate hounded 
on by a Luciferian desire. Like a chorus they 
blow “the horrid deed in every eye;”’ their 
threnody went up like a tide of heart-racking 
poetry and swept across the audience. They 
wore voluminous black or purple robes devoid of 
all ornament; they became presences that gave 
this early tragedy of Shakespeare’s something of 
the august and monumental calm of A“schylus. 
Buckingham came striding grandly into the 
picture, a striking figure of great height, in a blue 
jerkin and loose hose tied at the ankles, wearing 
heavy shoes, bareheaded and bare-throated, a 
noble neck that prophesied the ax. His flaxen 
hair, save for one dangling Napoleonic lock, was 
streaked smoothly aside; under it, like clean-cut 
marble, a face of the proudest aristocratic cast, 
a foil for the twisted Richard. Buckingham’s 
movements and attitudes were strangely conven- 
tionalized and were dominated by a restrained 
athletic grace and a statuesque immobility. 
Now his gestures became hieratic as when offer- 
ing Richard the crown, now he made steps that 
seemed part of a solemn dance. The open- 
hearted Hastings was a wandering pyramid of 








THE INTENSIVE SHAKESPEARE 213 


warmish white, the man, though tall, almost over- 
whelmed by the tent-like mantle. 

The naiveté of the play with its crude, blood- 
compounded villain and his cynical and bom- 
bastic soliloquies, was augmented by the frequent 
use of prologues—some of them innovations 
built up on submerged texts of the play. In ad- 
dition to Richard’s opening lines, the dialogue of 
the murderers, the gossip of the burgesses, the 
lament of the scrivener and the epilogue of 
Richmond, were all given in the white misty 
funnel of the limelight on a small platform before 
the curtain. 

_ The unbudging wall transformed itself into a 
dungeon in the Tower, into a tapestry-hung 
palace wall, a street, a cloister, into the throne 
room with a tall flight of red steps. Atop these, 
terrible and triumphant, Richard as King, in- 
vested in an enormous cloak of scarlet with a 
rude and ponderous crown upon his head, burned 
like Satan amidst a fanfare of trumpets. At his 
feet, broadening downward to right and left, with 
hands and faces buried in their vast red robes, 
crouched the figures of the nobles, like devotees 
prostrate before an idol. ‘This scene was monu- 
mental and unforgettable and rooted up one’s 
inmost emotions. And yet it was an un- 


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214 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Shakespearean liberty which the producer took 
with the poet, a setting Asiatic rather than 
English. 

These red steps against the gray wall remained 
to the end. We accept them as a plain, as the 


royal tent and bed, as Bosworth Field. So fierce © 


is the emphasis, the compulsion of suggestion 
through the word, the contrast of the action with 
its environment—so powerfully does it dominate 
the mere background, that all incongruity pales. 

Richard, shimmering in armor, slumbers in an 
eerie dimness upon the dark-red expanse of these 
steps, as in a bed. ‘The spectres are to appear. 
But we are spared the usual procession of hag- 
gard ghastlinesses, the immemorial train of phan- 
toms defiling in the crass, fluttering limelight. 
Instead of this we are given a masterpiece of 
suggestion of the gruesome and the unearthly 
through sound. 

Through this haunted gloom there comes a low 
moaning, a whispering, a groaning, a gibbering, 
a whirring and a squeaking; cries, ejaculations, 
curses, direful oracular voices rolling out of an- 
other world; clanging chains, heavy footfalls, 
crashing, plangent, as of some doom advancing 
nearer and nearer—the whole a spookish sym- 
phony that rises and falls, swells and dwindles, 





THE INTENSIVE SHAKESPEARE 215 


a choral of damned, unhappy yet avenging spir- 
its, that curdles the blood and conjures up the 
Unimaginable. Appalling is this crescendo of 
the spectres, a sensation never to be forgotten. 

The very colors, the white and the red of the 
dynasties, marshaled in groups and masses, bat- 
tle with each other—as though in darkling fore- 
cast of the great antithesis of our modern world. 
The radiant Richmond, stern and serene as an 
archangel, dawns upon this summit of gloom and 
death. He is draped, like his men, in a billow- 
ing cloak of white—as opposed to the ominous 
scarlet of Richard and his followers. 

“A horse! a horse!’ Richard, stripped naked to 
the waist like a gladiator—what sword sheared 
off that coat of steel?—what if he should blast 
us with the aspect of his hump?—half-naked, I 
say, half-troll, half-king,—Richard comes stag- 
gering out upon the terrace above the lower wall, 
swinging his huge crown like a censer, in the me- 
chanical rhythm of despair, lashed on by the last 
paroxysms of his Cesarian mania, his iron will. 
‘He stumbles down those steps he mounted to 
power and glory, a bull gored and at bay; step by 
step he dances down, lower, nearer to the end that 
glares lividly on the upraised swords—at every 
step he seems to drip blood and hatred. 


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216 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Never was the elemental in Shakespearean 
drama unloosed with weightier or stormier im- 
pact on an audience. Never was there a more 
intensive concentration of the actor in his act, the 
speaker in his phrase. Never, despite all flaws, 
were scenes composed with bolder or surer strokes 
or cast in greater heat and plasticity. Here dra- 
matic relief merges into the monumental. 

This almost fanatical striving for Spartan sim- 
plicity of means for the attainment of esthetic 
ends, this horror of the merely decorative and the 
superficial, approaching almost to the point of 
barrenness, must be recognized as something new 
in the forms and media of the stage. J seem to 
hear—something like the fateful din of Jessner’s 
ghosts—the fall of rhythmic hoofs which are des- 
tined to trample upon the old property rooms, 
upon the rotting canvas and pasteboard glories, 
upon tattered stencils and traditions, so that the 
dust and the moths go up in clouds—the inten- 
sive, purified, expressionistic drama. 

A horse! a horse!—and one with wings! 








XIV 
THE CHROMATIC “OTHELLO” 


Unper those two revolutionaries in the re- 
creation, resetting and refurbishing of the higher 
drama, Leopold Jessner and Emil Pirchan, the 
Staatstheater in Berlin proceeds steadily with its 
program of renovation. 

Whenever an old piece is put on anew in this 
stately stone pile of Meister Schinkel’s, the dust 
flies thick and high about the Gendarmenmarkt 
where the great show-house stands. ‘There is a 
sound of ripping and tearing, as though mummies 
were being rudely unwrapped, a rattling hail of 
brittle shells, husks and carapaces, a fungoid 
smell of fustiness and dry rot. The wigs and 
rigs of Themis are being beaten and combed by 
these two adventurous showmen. 

For some time Jessner has been tapping and 
sounding the Shakespearean cosmos at unexpected 
spots and angles. Emil Pirchan, his Director of 
Decorations, with his prism of an eye and his 


palette of a brain, has been brooding out new 
217 


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218 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


scenes, symbols, costumes and color combinations 
with gay and ruthless disregard for all aged or 
academic interpretations, for everything dead, 
calcined, fossilized and even venerable that has 
hooked itself with clamp and claw into the body 
of the living work of art—the saprophytic ivy 
of the costumer, property master and scene 
painter. 

Nearly always out of this onslaught, this world 
of dust, shards and splinters, there results—like 
a bright tulip flaming out of the mold in a 


forcing-frame—something wearing a new face, 


and bearing new forms and contours. 

The play becomes plastic; it is not only played, 
but played with; and, as a rule, with great rever- 
ence. Errors, of course, are made, the blunders 
of a taste that is too adventurous, sometimes a 
cut results in a wound or an excrescence. Some- 
times these reformers, hot of heel and hand, 
snatch from us dear and well-beloved fetishes 
that have become part of the plays that have 
become part of us. 

In the main, however, these innovations are 
full of artistic and dramatic values, constructive, 
creative. They surge and swirl about the cen- 
tral pillar of the work; the poetry remains intact. 
The poet and the poet’s intention are first stripped 


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THE CHROMATIC “OTHELLO” — 219 


of the old habiliments, usually not their own, 
and then both are set walking and talking in a 
new garb. 

The eternal in the poet is not gainsaid nor 
coined into theatrical drachmas; his children are 
given room to breathe and move. The lines are 
liberated and set pealing in a greater freedom, 
the enacted characters are flung back upon them- 
selves, driven up to the very source of their be- 
ing in the dramatist’s heart. 

To “re-feel”’ his original intent or inspiration 
—that is the problem. This way, I think, leads 
directly from the Globe Theatre in Southwark 
to the Staatstheater in the Gendarmenmarkt. 

The imperishable plasticity of Shakespearean 
drama also becomes evident in this process. It 
is like life itself: its inherent saps and forces are 
ever charged, ever filled afresh from its great 
central core—those elements that fed and set in 
motion a thousand commentators, the busy dwarfs 
that built their jungles about the giant’s garden. 
This vital germ of supreme genius has gone flash- 
ing along the chains of time, producing books out 
of books as by a kind of horrible parthenogenesis. 

These renovations carried on at Berlin’s for- 
mer Theatre Royal are, therefore, renewals in the 
true sense, are re-creation, decrustation ; and since 


220 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


this theatrical reformation is free from any dilet- 
tante invasion of the soul, nerves and organs of 
the great play, it is to be embraced with a gay 
gratitude. Nor have these “Neu-Etnstudier- 
ungen” and ‘“‘Neu-Inszenterungen” of Shake- 
speare anything in common with the “revivals” in 
the manner, or according to the memory, of Beer- 
bohm Tree. 

Shakespeare, as we all know, needs no reviving 
in the land where he is often and affectionately 
called “Unser Shakespeare.” Borne upon this 
strong, broad, ever-flowing current of a living 
love and interest among the people, the great 
plays pulsate with this transfused, translated 
blood—and thus Germany munificently repays 
humanity’s debt. I believe that even the intense 
preoccupation with his works, displayed by the 
German Shakespearean scholars, philologists and 
anglicists would, despite all pedantry, serve to 
keep the poet alive. 

Another active element which gives shape to 
these new presentations is the enforced economy 
laid upon the Director of Decorations. Great 
stores of precious stuffs are still available from 
the royal supplies, but no theatre, even one con- 
trolled by the State, could afford to purchase all 


a 
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THE CHROMATIC “OTHELLO” 221 


the costly fabrics made necessary by the older 
tradition—the historically sumptuous. 

Strong and compelling effects are sought by 
simplest means; and these often produce the rich- 
est, most striking results. JI have already des- 
cribed the revolutionary “Richard III” as pro- 
duced at the Schauspielhaus. Jessner and 
Pirchan soon afterward took up “Othello” and 
scored another success. 

Fritz Kortner played the title part in 
“Othello” as in “Richard III.” This actor is of 
the school and stock of Betterton and Burbage, 
a massive figure, implying sound peasant blood, 
with a large and noble head, with oddly truculent 
and pursed-up features, bright, blank eyes and 
pouting lips—in short, a superb mask for the 
Moor. Kortner gave us an heroic, at times prim- 
itive, but always poignantly human Othello; a 
warrior softened by a smoldering golden love, 
then caught in the pitiless works of the plot— 
the anvil and butt of the hellish Iago. One saw 
him and believed in him as a creature crucified 
upon his own broad magnanimity—the noble- 
hearted, impulsive, Africanish dupe. One saw, 
like a thunder cloud creeping across a sunny land- 
scape, his fate approaching, eclipsing for a time 


222 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


the whiteness of his soul, until this shimmers 
again in grandeur at the end. 

It will prove a brave show to let the pictures 
of this “Othello” defile before us in curt stage 
directions. We have bare surfaces and a very 
barren stage, yet far from empty, for it is thronged 
with luminous color. Here and there crops forth 
an architectural hint, a fragment, a motif of the 
period, a whiff of Venice or of Cyprus. ‘The cos- 
tumes were not mere masses and changing blots 
of color, as in ‘Richard IJI’””—they were simple, 
yet there was history and even archeology in 
them. 2 
First Picture: In front of Brabantio’s house. 
Night. Iago in close-fitting poisonous green, a 
serpentine figure, lithe as a lie. MRoderigo, a 
gilded young flaneur of the Venice of that day, 


all in golden red, a dandified costume, full of 


preciosity. Their hullabaloo rouses Brabantio, 
whose house is gradually fetched out of the back- 
ground by the growing light, and then recedes 
again as the old Senator in fiery red stalks forth. 
Othello in a very vocal yellow silk, a fine har- 
mony of brown, bronze and gold, yet bearing in 
the colors of his robes the symbol of his coming 
agony. The two groups of hostile armed men— 
Cassio’s and Brabantio’s—Pirchan costumed 


THE CHROMATIC “OTHELLO” 223 


alike, but with colors inverted—here black and 
red, there red and black—signifying opposition 
—hostility. 

Second Picture: The Senate. Suggested by 
two full-bodied white pillars shining against the 
Rundhorizont. Candlelight. The Senators in 
wallowing robes of cardinal with their backs to 
the audience. Guards in chain armor. Desde- 
mona in a rose-colored robe. She enters from the 
back, ascending from below. 

Third Picture: A sky-vault flooded with a 
vibrant yellow. Steps, as to some grandiose 
quay. Montano in purple, Othello in yellow. 


‘The populace in motley enters from below and 


prostrates itself upon the ground so that its many 
white, blank visages might not draw the light- 
ning of attention from the big scene. 

Fourth Picture; and Fifth: Here Shakespeare 
plainly says: A hall in the castle. Pirchan 
hints at a tavern and confronts us with the arch 
of a drinking-booth at a fair, behung with gaudy 
ribbons. ‘““War is over’—the herald comes on, 
half a harlequin. Then the famous drinking- 
scene, played and sung by toppling figures against 
an orange-colored glow from some kind of con- 
flagration behind the arch. Then the clown, a 
true, an almost historical clown of the Renais- 


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224 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


sance, of the beffa, an estray from some court, 
full of pathos, capréccdéo and squeaky, mincing 
repartee. Then the doleful musicians, plagued 
by this zany. 

Sixth Picture: Shows us a fragment, a hint 
of the palace, a segment of rounded arcade re- 
lieved brilliantly against the luminous back- 
ground. It is raised upon a broad flight of steps 
and furnishes a studied and subtle setting for the 
carefully composed masses of color and the fine 
Cinquecento attitudes. The Seventh picture is 
like the sixth; a few details only are changed. 

Eighth Picture: Reveals the light of the 
Rundhorizont quenched, throwing into sharp and 
stereoscopic relief a great curved bench, white as 
chalk, with the clown perched like a macaw upon 
its bold volutes. Desdemona still in tender rose, 
and Emilia, as the older, riper woman, in a deep- 
ening and darkening of this color. Othello in a 
more sinister yellow with a portentous note of 
black bursts upon this symphony in white, rose 
and red, a chromatic irruption, restless, discord- 
ant, ominous. 

Ninth Picture: A single bold column shoots 
upward from the centre of the stage and vanishes 
in its zenith. Its entasis or taper is toward the 
base, an unnatural construction, symbolic of su- 


THE CHROMATIC “OTHELLO” 225 


perincumbent doom, of an Atlantean load of im- 
pending disaster, of the tottering structure of 
lives overladen and top-heavy. Lodovico and 
his attendants appear as incroyables and cox- 
combs of the time. Here a sharp, crying con- 
trast is expressed between the hyper-cultivation 
of the Venetian world and the more primitive 
world of the soldier Moor. 

Tenth Picture: This breaks soothingly upon 
us with a dark blue night sky—always this im- 
pression of playing upon a mountain-top, always 
this encompassment by the eternal—puppets 
projected against the immensities of time and 


space. A single vast carpet with a Gargantuan 


silk cushion in the centre of the stage. A kind 
of lovers’ nest, this. Then Othello, infected 
with the deadly lie, searching the soul of Emilia, 
his sulphurous imagination here in this very 
“room” conjuring up monsters against a world of 
fire—the narrowing walls of the torture chamber 
in which he writhes—loathing, yet longing to be- 
lieve in his chimera. 

Eleventh Picture: The bed—this, too, is of 
heroic size; a bed of state, with its canopy climb- 
ing up the wall to a dizzy height—a towering, 
snowy cone, crowned with a baldachin as with a 
cloud; below, the exaggerated expanse of cover- 


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226 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


let—a field, a battlefield of love and death—the 
whole dimly suggestive of some great marble 
sarcophagus—or a hero’s tent? Desdemona in 
voluminous folds of white, is revealed singing 
her “Willow, willow” song. Before her stands 
Othello, also in white, half-hidden under a dark 
blue mantle. This bedchamber scene Jessner, 
for some reason or other, tears in two, permitting 
the short scene with the mutual stabbing of 
Roderigo and Cassio to intervene in the twelfth 
picture: A fallow greenish night sky hangs 
threateningly overhead, pierced in its centre by 
a strange, conventionalized tree (the hidden bed, 
the form of which carries on through this scene). 
The action takes place in the murk, in silhouette, 
softening the drastic features of this episode, lead- 
ing on to the precipitation of the final tragedy. 
In the Thirteenth Picture, the monumental bed 
once more looms overwhelmingly in the light of 
the lamp, casting sharp, mystic tracts of shadow 
on the wall. Now comes the startling innova- 
tion which Jessner has made—without apparent 
dramatic or esthetic reason. Was this a capitu- 
lation to modern erotics, to the popularity of the 
French bedroom farce? It would be difficult to 
imagine Jessner succumbing to such bait. At all 
events, here, like two marble figures upon a cathe- 


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ieee Aca i 
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THE CHROMATIC “OTHELLO” 227 


dral tomb, are Othello and Desdemona lying 
side by side. Othello rouses himself, and here, 
despite the dignity of the acting, there is a touch 
of grotesque, the incongruous, a fatal hint of the 
homely, the household, and husband-like—and 
yet only in retrospect—every smile was banned 
during the action. 

The Moor speaks his monologue kneeling— 
puts out the light—‘“‘and then puts out the 
light’”—of Desdemona’s life. Follows his suicide 
standing—the illumination retreats, leaving the 
tormented bed with its white-clad corpses shim- 
mering out of the dusk and with Lodovico’s final 
words rolling like a requiem over all—the whole 
unreal, phantasmal, mystically poetic. 

Out of the high light of this last scene Iago, 
green as a viper, with glinting, metallic eyes, 
rears rigidly in the clutch of the mail-covered 
men. A phosphorescent vision and a wonderful 
one in this unforgettable version of “Othello.” 





XV 
THE DRAMA ON FIRE 


For a time—one exalted and thrilling hour—the 
flame of the Revolution changed from red to 
white and like some shimmering temple towered 
wonderfully over Germany. It drew aloft mil- 
lions of eyes and hearts, sick with the nausea of 
Earth. It was like a gigantic altar-fire which 
this folk of dreamers and proletarian philos- 
ophers felt they had kindled upon the blood- 
blasted, cinder-smothered stone on which War 
had just been busily butchering his sacrifices. 


Sancta Humanitas seemed triumphant over the ~ 


red craziness. Something was coming out of 
Chaos after all. Militarism everywhere wiped 


from its plinths of bronze and marble! Release ~ 
from the sin-stuffed Past—ah, hope that came — 


upon them like a dream, a slinking opiate! 
Universal fraternization reached or would 
soon reach hands across the world like the rain- 
bow of a new dispensation—a bridge! Above it 
the Soviet star dartled its rose-red rays. World 


Revolution! A New World! 
228 


. 
. 
: 





THE DRAMA ON FIRE 229 


Then came the Great Disillusion—for one 
thing the unbudging wall of the continued Hun- 
ger Blockade. The mandibles and tentacles of 
the Past, the Old World, the Old System, em- 
bedded themselves in this stuff of altruistic 
dreams. Party strife yelped—a nine-headed 
Cerberus. 

The only reflection of the White Fire was that 
playing upon millions of bayonets—seas of steel 
upon all horizons. Then came Versailles, the 
fall of the curtain, the fall of the ax. Then the 
flame sank, the flame stank—guttered.... 
Now only a few sparks are left. But a single 
spark suffices, as we know, to— — 

We mourn the green, unfulfilled genius that 
went down in the war. But I for one mourn 
the genius that was fed by this afflatus, this 
vision of humanity redeemed—gentus that was 
whipped for one brief nuptial flight with Death 
into productive, high-keyed ecstasy by this mi- 
rage upon the desert of Europe, then tossed crash- 
ing into the limbo of hopelessness, sterility, si- 
lence. 

Many of these may have been airy talents, 
though they have left work heavy with the lava 
of the moment. The greatest of them all has 
happily been preserved from the fate of absorp- 





230 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


tion by the implacable afterwardness of things, 
though it has taken prison walls to do it. This 
is Ernst Toller, student, proletarian poet and 
dramatist—the most dominant and flagrant 
genius hatched by the German Revolution. 

Toller was in fact an actor, a leader in it. 
And he was of the most dangerous type—an ag- 
gressive thinker, an inspired poet, a headlong 
youth carrying his heart in his hand now as a 
torch, now as a trumpet. ‘To-day at the yeasty 
age of thirty, he is a prisoner in the Bavarian 
fortress of Niederschonenfeld for his part in the 
Bavarian Communist Revolt of 1919. His 
gift of dramatic creation may be said to have 
saved him from the twelve bullets of the firing 
squad—unusual, yet in this instance, character- 
istic concession on the part of the art-adoring 
Bavarian monarchists. 

Toller’s first play was called ‘“Wandlung” 
(“Transformation”), in six stations of the via 
cructs of war. He was himself the hero, and 
led us into the external and internal hells and hor- 
rors he underwent from the first day of the red 
overture of war to his own “‘transmogrification.” 
Scenes never before risked upon a stage were pre- 
sented as matters of course in this torrential play. 
Thus in the Vorspiel, foreplay, so to speak, the 








THE DRAMA ON FIRE 231 


War Death (in steel helmet and military gear) 
and the Civilian Death (in top hat and gaiters) 
meet on a vast field of graves—to strike a balance 
in their business. The War Death calls his vic- 
tims, officers and men, out of their graves and 
commands a parade—a scene of immense ma- 
cabre power. 

The play closes with the demolition of a 
statue upon which the hero has been working— 
“Our Victorious Nation,’ a symbolic act which 
reveals at one blow the anti-national urge of the 
German intellectual proletariat. There is a 
Christlike exhortation to the multitude to join 
hands, to destroy bastilles, but to deal gently with 
the erring—for the Poet-Dramatist is terrified 
by the Terror. 

This play paved the way (with crosses, graves, 
prison stones, fragments of the social order) for 
his greater work “Masse Mensch.” This strange 
drama seizes and shakes and harrows up its au- 
diences somewhere in Germany night after night. 
The play, “A visionary show,” as Toller calls it, 
was the product of a kind of spiritual eruption. 
The student-poet flung it upon paper in Octo- 
ber, 1919, in two days and a half, hiding him- 
self in his cell like an animal, refusing food, re- 
fusing to have the cell cleaned, refusing to talk 


232 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


with comrades. But he spent a whole year in 
giving it higher form and finish. 

Ernst Toller is more than a proletariat party 
dramatist, sinking art in theory and _ political 
polemics. He offers his fire and brimstone in 
vessels shaped by art. The artist in him rejects 
all compromises with his esthetic conscience. 
The dramatist in him sees always both sides of 
both sides. His passion is Humanity and he is 
a truculent protagonist for the rights of the 
Masses, but his championship is never blind; 
he preserves the balance necessary to create 
true drama. He sees the eternal human- 
all-too-human wrecking the very cause of hu- 
manity. 

“Masse Mensch’—the title translates but 
lamely and baldly into “Mass Mankind” or 
‘(Man in the Mass” or “Herd Mankind’”—is a 
dramatic conflict between the abstract state and 
the spirit of the masses. The play is divided 
into “‘pictures” and these again into “‘real” and 
“dream” pictures. The characters are nameless 
—Workmen, Workwomen, the Nameless One, 
Officer, Priest, Man, Bankers, Prisoners, Guards, 
Shadows. Only the heroine, Sonia Irene L., a 
woman of the caste of officials who makes com- 
mon cause with the workers, is given a name— 


4 





cee ae eee 
& 


THE DRAMA ON FIRE 233 


significantly Russian. She is the Blue Woman 
embodying Love doomed to crucifixion, relent- 
less loyalty to Truth—herself the human sac- 
rifice. 

The scenes are intensely visionary, the lan- 
guage lyrical, yet the dramatic seizure never loos- 
ens, but knots up the loose structure of the play 
into a glowing chain. This chain, like some 
great transmission cable, keeps racing forward, 
bearing the scenery and characters over pro- 
founds that seem dramatic impossibilities. 
Some of the scenes are merely projections of the 
dreams and visions of the heroine Sonia—events 
that enact themselves upon the stage of her own 
soul. 

The “Mass Man” is incorporated in the 
“Nameless One,” who appears first in this scene, 
then in that, revealing the face of the Mass, 
now as Might, now as Madness, now as God, 
now as Destiny, now as Guilt. The human re- 
lationship between the revolutionary Sonia and 
her orthodox husband, faithful to his post and 
to the State, is brought to bear poignantly at 
times. But it is secondary to the real theme and 
the real forces of the play. These may be 
summed up as Man against Man, the Mass 
against its confines, the Will-to-Power of the 


234 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Multitude flattering itself with a formula of 
Release. 

The performance at the Volksbihne in Berlin 
was staged by Hans Strohbach and remains mem- 
orable for its almost naked simplicity and stark 
relief. The background was in many cases only 
an enormous dark curtain with heavy, almost 
cast-iron-like folds, or the opalescent distances 
and twilights of the Kuppel-Horizont. The ac- 
tors were kept from being swallowed up in these 
gulfs of shadow by adroit cross and top lights 
which tore them out of the darkness and, as it 
were, kept them afloat on a middle plane. This 
world was limbo, a prison—dusk lay over all, 
and the fallow, corpse-like light in which mys- 
teries or abominations breed. This light, this at- 
mosphere, worked mightily upon the spectator 
who sat rigid as in a vice, between dramatic en- 
thrallment and esthetic wonder—as before some 
grim painting by Goya. 

The characters were crassly realistic in their 
dress, bald, commonplace, negligent garb, with- 
out the slightest concession to the theatrical. 
But this dress, exhibited on the stage as in a 
show window, became eloquent, became active. 
These were the rough, untidy garments of the 


THE DRAMA ON FIRE 235 


proletariat—they spoke, they sobbed of grime 
and use, the dull, drab husks of prisons, real 
prisons and symbolic, those of the soul and of 
the body and of civilization. 

The actors, especially those of the crowds, 
seemed devoid of all make-up, seemed scooped 
up out of some metropolitan mob slum, factory 
serfs with grim, hard-bitten, suffering faces, fa- 
natic eyes, faces shining with sweat or with oil, 
the sweat of the machines. Their speech was 
feverish, hoarse, ejaculatory—the speech of men 
and women who were being chewed between the 
jaws of Crisis and Catastrophe. Only the voices 
of the Priest, the Officer, the Companion, intoned 
their lines in the serene conviction of power. 
The text is blank verse, rude, irregular, spas- 
modic, yet full of immense compressive and ex- 
plosive power. 

The First Picture: Sonia Irene L. in a blue, 
one-piece garment with the “comrades” in the 
rear room of a worker’s tavern—a clumsy table, 
a bottle, a few chairs against the drapery of a 
ponderous curtain. Plans, consultations for the 
strike, the revolt. Then the challenge to her 
loyalty. Follows the clash with her husband, 
the quiet, dignified incarnation of Loyalty to the 





236 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


State, coldly reproachful. She wavers, longs for 
him womanishly, but casts in her lot with the 
workers. 

The Second is a Dream Picture: A blue, spas- 
modic light sings forth from the triangular open- 
ing between ponderous draperies, a beautiful yet 
sulphurous and sinister illumination. Against 
this in inky silhouette, a pillar or two, a stock 
clerk at a desk and on a chair, both unnaturally 
stilt-like, a suggestion of the Stock Exchange. 
Several harpy-like old men in cloth top hats, 
frock coats and spats, bark and cry. The pother 
of the Exchange goes up, eerie cries, bell-ringings, 
the monotonous, demoniacal voice of the Clerk 
like a croupier noting the bids—war stocks. 
“Flame-thrower Trust,” ‘“War Prayer-book Syn- 
dicate,”’ ‘“Poison-gas Concern,” etc. The bank- 
ers like obese ghouls, crouching on a flight of 
steps in a dim gray cross light, and discussing the 
financial effects of the last offensive. The blue 
background shifts to red, then to green. The 
Woman and her Companion appear. Sonia 
holds out her arms and cries: ‘““O Man, O Men!” 
and vanishes. Silence. Then, squeaking and 
gibbering, the spookish pandemonium proceeds, 
with the Financiers dancing round the tall desk 
of the Clerk. 








THE DRAMA ON FIRE 237 


The Third Picture: Darkness. Vague, pal- 
lid spots glimmering to the very top of the pros- 
cenium arch. An orotund chorus comes swelling 
into the theatre, as from vast distances: 


O we, forever wedged between 
The gulches of steep houses— 
O we delivered up 
To mechanisms of sardonic systems— 
We the visageless in nights of tears, 
We forever disparted from our mothers, 
Out of the gulfs of factories we call. 
When shall we live life? 
When shall we work at the Work? 

- When shall Deliverance come ? 


The obscurity melts. A high pyramid of hu- 
man forms and faces becomes visible, piled 
thickly together like a segment of an amphi- 
theatre high above a small platform. A meet- 
ing of the workers. “Strike?” “Revolution?” 
Speeches, violent, brutal, demanding the impera- 
tive of force, or soft and full of pacifistic per- 
suasiveness, go shuttling to and fro. The Crowd 
is lashed into pitching rapids, to wild outcries, 
then stricken to silent lumps of slag. “Mass is 
Leadership!” ‘Mass is Power!” “Mass is 
Right!” ‘Mass is Action!” 

The Fourth Picture is again a Traumbild, one 


eM LL : Sl aere Ait 


238 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


of the most eerie and impressive of all. It is a 
phantasmagoric sketch in sanguine and bitumen 
of humanity’s great prison. A catastrophic, evil 
murk. Great rocks—or are they walls?—lean 
‘top-heavily from the sides, like forbidding pres- 
ences, watching. In the centre on the ground 
there is a bluish-greenish light, smoldering like 
something submarine or phosphorescent. A man 
with shorn head, in loose purple garb stands on a 
low flat box of black which contains the lantern. 
His attitude is grotesque and strained, an accor- 
dion hangs loose between his outstretched hands. 
A doleful chorus, a ribald lamentation, a kind of 
jail-birds’ De Profundis resounds slowly—a grim, 
almost majestic choral. The concertina squeaks 
and belches. Shadows in prison dress arise, 
chains rattle—an abominable dance of wrenched 
joints and stiffened limbs begins. The music 
grows slimy and lascivious, then ponderous and 
plodding, then whips itself into drunkenness and 
fury. A Man, red as blood from head to foot, 
comes in. 7 

The chorus of the Death-doomed. Prosti- 
tutes. Again the dance. Parti-colored light 
from above falls segmentally upon the writhing 
mass, like the ribs of a many-colored revolving 
fan, lashing them on, spinning them round, 





a ae ee ee pins, gt See ee ee 





THE DRAMA ON FIRE 239 


round, round. The Blue Woman appears, her 


Companion, then the Husband. Guards. A 


metamorphosis of faces and persons. The 
Husband is seen standing against the wall— 
rifles are raised. ‘The Blue Woman takes her 
place beside him. Salvos—of underearthly 
laughter. 

The Fifth Picture brings the apex of the Revo- 
lution. A broad flight of steps, as in the hall or 
lobby of a public building, steps leading no- 
where, cut off by curtains. Fighting in the 
streets—barricades. Sonia and the Nameless 
One. Man is slaughtering Man—Sonia’s voice 
is uplifted in terrible protest. Scout after scout 
arrives with black news. ‘The curve of feverish 
tension climbs steeper and steeper. Furious de- 
bates. Shots and shouts without. Suddenly an 
avalanche of revolutionaries in flight, men and 
women, drab and dingy but with blazing eyes 
and streaming hair, bursts into the hall and floods 
up the steps. They press close to one another, 
then turn like harried animals at bay. Salvo 
upon salvo without. The thunder of great 
doors slammed shut and barricaded. The thun- 
der of great doors battered in. A cry: “We 
die together!” 

With convulsed, ecstatic faces, with out- 


1 Ee ee 
~ Gee 


240 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


stretched hands and heads the human pyramid 
thunders forth the “Internationale” with its dev- 
astating music of the “Marseillaise” plowing 
up and kindling every heart—a living bastion of 
revolt. Volleys of song answer the hammering 
machine-guns. The heads of soldiers appear— 


rifles—then a cool, spick-and-span lieutenant: 


steel-helmeted, with drawn sword. At the Offi- 
cer’s command, the hands, but now outstretched 
in strained horizontal lines like defiant lances, 
lift themselves to the vertical. Sonia, the 
Woman in Blue, the Instigatress, is led off. 

The Sixth is once more a Dream Picture. 
Space—crystal clear, limitless, flooded with light. 
In the centre a great rounded cage in a nimbus of 
still intenser light. Within this cage, huddled 
together, the figure of Sonia. Close beside the 
cage the Purple Companion. Now gigantic 
shadows climb to the zenith and lurch by in an 
awe-inspiring apocalyptic procession—headless 
shadows, victims of the Revolution, droning 
down accusations from the firmament. Sonia in 
answer supports the charges, accuses herself. 
The human clouds vanish, three Bankers appear, 
squawking quotations. A train of convicts 
comes and sways monotonously round the cage. 








THE DRAMA ON FIRE 241 


A Voice rolls out of the Infinite: ‘The Mass!” 
ne cagea Ones’ “God!” An Echo: “The 
Mass.” The Caged One: ‘The Mass is Must. 
The Mass is Guiltlessness. God is Guilty.” 
Echo: “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!’ The Com- 
panion: “God is in Thee.” The Prisoners lift 
up their arms, like mechanisms. The stage grows 
dark. 

The Last and Seventh Scene: a Prison Cell. 
A square of ground glass glimmers. The 
Woman in Blue at a table: : 


O paths through ripening fields of wheat 
In days of August— 


O wanderings in wintry hills ere dawnlight broke! 
O tiny beetle in the breath of noon— 
O world! ... 


The Husband enters. Death sentence not 
confirmed. Forgiveness. “I warned you against 
the Mass. Who roots it up, roots up Hell!” 
A final debate, Love—Duty—Humanity—the 
State. Her arms burn to embrace him—he goes. 
Then comes the Nameless One, tempting her to 
flee. Again the changes are wrung upon the 
ever-shifting characters and countenance of the 


Mass. 


242 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


Sonia: I would betray the Masses 
Were I to claim a single human life. 
The Doer can only offer up himself. 
Hear then! no man must slaughter 
man 

For thing or cause, 
Unholy is the cause that urges this. 
Whoso demandeth blood is Moloch. 
God was Moloch. 
The State was Moloch. 
The Mass was Moloch. 

THE 

NaMELEss ONE: And who—and what—is holy? 


Sonia: Some time— 
Communality— 
The Free Folk in the Common Task 
united, 
Free Mankind in the Common Task 
united. 


The Task! the Folk! 


The Priest stalks in—to save a soul—and 
bears with him the doctrine that man is evil and 
the dusty air of creed, commandment, civiliza- 
tion. The Officer comes, bearing the Death Sen- 
tence. “Orders are Orders!’ The Woman in 
Blue goes out. Enter two female prisoners, 
gray, bedraggled vultures. One pounces upon 
the loaf of bread upon the table, the other upon 


Og ga Oe Oe Eee Pea 


THE DRAMA ON FIRE 243 


a mirror, a silk cloth. They conceal these. A 
volley reéchoes from the prison yard. The two 
she-prisoners are startled, are shaken into re- 
morse: “Sister, what makes us do this?” 
They put the things back. 

Sonia’s bullet-riddled breast is not yet cold, 
yet her sacrifice has already borne good fruit. 
And at the close of this flaming drama two forces 
confront each other as before—the State is Mo- 
loch—the Mass is Moloch. But even in the 
symbolism of the last action in the last act, 
Property and the Rights of Property utter their 
immemorial nolz me tangere—touch me not! 


XVI 
“THE MACHINE-STORMERS” 


Max Reinuarpt’s huge and shambling theatre 
smoldered to an intenser red than the dull Pom- 
peiian madder tint in which it had been dyed 
by its architect, Hans Poelzig. The playhouse 
grew hot from within. A volcanic drama, a fe- 
verish audience and the lightning-laden atmos- 
phere which hung vibrating over Berlin shortly 
after the murder of Walther Rathenau, served 
to convert it into a kind of furnace. The meta- 
phor is not forced; for apart from the dramatic, 
emotional and political combustibles, a furnace 
of iron, glaring with reverberating cherry-colored 
fire, burned like Baal’s altar on the central stage 
in the last act. 

All this inflammable stuff was provided by a 
drama called “Die Maschinenstirmer’—“‘The 
Machine-Stormers.” It was given a ceremonial 
birth in this big showhouse, but it was conceived 
amidst much spiritual suffering in a fortress 
prison in Bavaria. Exposed to the fervors that 

244 


“THE MACHINE-STORMERS” 245 


throbbed from these lines, one half expected the 
stalactite pendants of stucco in the great vault 
over the auditorium to melt and crumble. One 
was surprised on emerging under the stars again, 
to find that the proletarian agony that went forth 
from this limbo of want, hunger and sorrow, this 
mill in which human grist was ground before 
one’s very eyes by a new Fate—the Machine— 
had not pierced the walls of the Grosses Schau- 
spielhaus (which now appeared more or less 
bloodstained ), and stunned the prurient pleasure- 
chasers in the streets. 

The theme was English—the Luddite riots at 
Nottingham in 1816—seen through the eyes of 
one of the most tumultuous literary forces of 
the German political-literary revolution. ‘The 
Machine-Stormers,” by Ernst Toller, is agitation 
in its most intensive dramatic-demagogic form. 
It is a bitter, sulphurous sermon by a proletarian 
on the peak to the peon-proletarian in the deeps. 
The motif and the action move back and forth 
with something of the implacable monotony of 
a pacing, puffing, screeching, clanking machine. 
Monotony here becomes an esthetic danger with 
which the young dramatist had not reckoned; 
the danger that evolves when poignancy becomes 
too regularly reiterant, that is, mechanical. We 


246 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


then react more slowly to each successive shock, 
more slowly and more dully. 

These dingy masses of Nottingham weavers, 
fluttering in thin rags, poor, harried scarecrows of 
the slums, are like sheep marched by machinery 
to the Chicagoan shambles. Yet these sheep re- 
belled against the machinery because it was new 
and strange. This living raw material of the 
dawn of the nineteenth century was fed into the 
wheels of this latter-day play, and one saw that 
the problem was as ancient as human society, 
that there had always been endless ribbons re- 
volving, now faster, now slower, carrying the 
working masses toward the great gray hoppers. 

Toller is still too young to have rounded out 
his dramatic mastership, and the propagandist 
often halts the dramatist in the mid-career of the 
dialogue. Here and there, despite the stormy 
independence of the lines, we hear echoes, catch 
the accents of other and older men; Hauptmann 
in “The Weavers” (Toller risked an all-too- 
obvious parallel here), Georg Kaiser in his apothe- 
osis of the mechanical; Shaw, too, but a burning 
and rapturous Shaw. 

“The Machine-Stormers” is a monotonous yet 
tense threnody and epic of pain and labor. The 
light that streaks across it lies in the radiance 


“THE MACHINE-STORMERS” 247 


of the message which Toller gives to the mystic, 
half-crazed sage, Old Man Reaper, who ambles 
prophetically in the spirit of a Shakespearean 
clown through the play, seeking the solution in 
the Bible, and then in sudden outbursts of wrath, 
pointing his stick like a gun at God: ‘We must 
help one another and be kind.” 

The Machine descends upon the poor little 
world of these workers. They behold in it only 
the primitive dragon devouring their work, their 
livelihood, their lives, and spawning more misery 
and hunger. The children cry for bread. So 
there comes upon them the hot, primitive, most 
natural impulse to destroy the monster. Jim 
Cobbet, a workman with a vision widened and 
clarified by travel, seeks to aid the weavers by 
other means. He warns them of the ultimate 
triumph of the Machine, but is overruled and 
overborne and meets the fate of most saviors. 

Toller, despite his passion for the proletariat, 
is not blind to the fact that it, too, 1s Moloch, 
and Machine. 

The play demands a big canvas and so it 
spreads itself over the whole vast stage, fore-stage 
and central amphitheatre. The Prologue opens 
upon the gloom in the hall of the House of 
Lords: a gray vacuity, shafts of mote-laden light, 


248 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


the white-wigged, blue-robed Chancellor lying 
like a corpse in a grotesque attitude in his great 
chair. Beside him, to left and right, there are 
two speakers; before them, in the murk, dimly re- 
vealed at intervals, phantom-like, bewigged 
members of the House of Lords. 

A bill is to be voted upon: “Whosoever de- 
stroys a machine shall pay for it with his life.” 

Young Lord Byron, making his maiden 
speech, protests against the bill in fine humane 
heroics; Lord Castlereagh brings the spirit of 
power and the crushing utilitarianism of the time 
to bear upon the members; balloting takes place, 
the bill is passed, the session dissolves like smoke. 

The first scene opens in a public square in 
Nottingham. The setting is by Herzfelde; a 
Gargantuan child’s play-box, ramshackle, semi- 
expressionistic. Two scarlet gallows erected by 
the workers to hang “traitors” in effigy brand 
themselves upon the eyes of the audience. Chil- 
dren whimper for bread as Jim Cobbet returns, 
pack on back, to his native town. The ring- 
leaders make furious harangues, the effigies are 
hanged after the question has been put and judg- 
ment delivered. The words are shot forth from 
the crowd’s lips like bullets; clenched fists and 
bare arms are thrust out above the sea of tousled 


“THE MACHINE-STORMERS” 249 


heads. Cobbet speaks and is hailed as a prophet 
and leader—to the discomfiture of the deposed 
mob-masters, above all, Ned Ludd, the furious 
and fanatic leader who has given his name to this 
historic revolt. 

Then one sees the hovels of the weavers: torn, 
gaping shells of attics behind the triangles of 
cheerless crumbling gables; whimpering children; 
wailing women, men, mute or cursing. 

Old Reaper wildly consults his ponderous 
Bible, chatters, and challenges God with his staff 
as with a rifle, through the rents in the roof. 

Through some symbolic fancy on the part of 
Toller, the faces of Lord Byron and Lord Castle- 
reagh are repeated in the faces of Jim Cobbet and 
Mr. Ure, the manufacturer. 

The struggle between the Mass and the Ma- 
chine is paralleled by the struggle between Jim 
Cobbet and Ure, between Jim Cobbet and his 
brother Henry Cobbet, Ure’s manager, between 
Jim Cobbet and his utilitarian mother, and be- 
tween Jim Cobbet and his fellow-weavers. 

The Machine, though an ever-present, imma- 
nent threat, remains hidden. Only in the last 
scene does it emerge—overwhelmingly! 

_A most striking stage picture was furnished by 
Ure’s villa. This was a pompous, glaring man- 


250 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


sion in blood-red brick and white marble, with 
grotesque, square-cut trees and hedges, fantastic 
hollyhocks, flaring steps and porch, all cut off 
from the street by a forbidding iron fence which 
presented its barbed rods like so many javelins 
held ‘‘at attention.”” The mob of weavers’ wives 
assembles before this fortress of profit and re- 
spectability, like a bank of smoke. 

Mary, the fair-haired wife of one of the 
weavers, is seen slinking from the mansion. 
Ha! Henry Cobbet’s light-o’-love, selling her- 
self for food! There is swift justice upon her 
at the hands of the furious women. Old Man 
Reaper reaches wonderful heights in his heart- 
racking apostrophes to God. 

Then Henry Cobbet appears upon the steps, 
and harangues the women. Words and cries vol- 
ley back and forth: ‘We want bread!” An 
emotional storm sweeps down upon us from this 
scene. In its violent strophe and antistrophe; 
in the isolation of the one figure; in the invisible 
presence of law and order; in the visible, spiked 
iron equator that separates two worlds; and in 
the visible ramparts of class and privilege; in the 
toil-worn, rebellious apparitions from the deeps, 
eaten by hunger and full of fear and hatred of 
the new Frankenstein creature, there is something 


“THE MACHINE-STORMERS” 251 


of the stature of Shakespeare or Aéschylus. 

The last picture is one of the most grandiose 
ever built up on the modern stage. It is the 
birth, the apotheosis of the Mechanistic Age. 
We are confronted by, almost sucked into, the 
interior of the enormous Machine Hall. It is 
vaulted like an observatory; great, curved, lat- 
ticed openings are visible in the dimness of the 
cupola, with the leaden firmament of Nottingham 
glowering through. 

Under this basks the Machine, the primitive 
engine of 1816, triumphant, bright, against the 
gloom of the background; a living mechanism, 
bathed in shimmering light, radiant in green, 
scarlet and bedecked with brazen bands and belts. 
It has ponderous upright boilers, a walking-beam, 
a tremendous red flywheel, ladders and galleries 
for the engineer, a substructure of brick, and 
furnace doors red and roaring with flame. 
Smoke pours from the stack, drifts of steam lie 
stratawise across engine and stage—like clouds 
across EF] Capitan in the Yosemite Valley. 

The Machine hums and pants, clanks and 
throbs, thumping rhythmically. Now and again 
the hand of the officiating priest—that is, the 
Engineer—pulls a long cord and unlooses the 
hoarse, reverberating organ note of the siren. 


252 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


The looms rattle and click to right and left. 
Little children are sitting before the beams, like 
galley slaves at the oars. 

Below this engine terrace the Weavers gather 
like a thunder cloud, men and women led on by 
Ned Ludd and his adjutants. In vain Jim Cob- 
bet confronts them, and exhorts them to reason, 
bidding them remember that the new monster 
must be mastered, not destroyed. “The ty- 
rant Machine, conquered by the spirit of creative 
man, will become your tool, your servant.” 

He is shouted at, then struck down; Ludd tri- 
umphs. The crowd, with hammers, clubs and 
crowbars, storms forward over him. The Ma- 
chine is attacked, battered, broken. The great 
flywheel stops, the steam siren groans like the 
voice of a wounded thing. The engineer flies 
to his gallery and goes mad, grows wildly pro- 
phetical—touched with a vision of the future. 
He pours forth, as from a pulpit, ecstatic, semi- 
biblical eloquence upon the wreckers, punctuat- 
ing his periods by the bourdon note of the steam 
whistle. 

Jim Cobbet dies, his face and brow are marble, 
like those of the dying Byron, and his last words 
are full of mingled love and bitterness: “You 


“THE MACHINE-STORMERS” 253 


will follow only the man who whips you into lib- 
eration!” 

Then the mechanism of the State comes to pro- 
tect the mechanism of industry. Soldiers file in; 
the short, sharp bark of military commands is 
more than all oratory; the mechanism of the rifle 
is master over the mechanism of mere muscle. 

The problem of Man and the Machine and the 
Master of the Machine is not solved in this play 
pitched in the industrial England of 1816, 
for it is not solved even to-day. Perhaps there 
are feasible solutions, economic, sociological, po- 
litical. 

But at present one sees only that embodied in 
the words of Old Man Reaper, moaning over the 
dead body of Jim Cobbet, charging God with all 
the incongruity of the world and hysterically cry- 
ing forth his refrain: 

“We must help one another and be kind.” 


XVII 
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 


Tue Will to Significance—by this term might one 
define the flow and direction of the various in- 
tellectual forces which have been unloosed in the 
New Germany. The nonsens of the war, the 
tempests which swooped down upon the structure 
of civilization, the collapse of thousands of pre- 
sumably safe, inviolable and enduring concepts 
and values, have reared up a Golgotha of ruin 
and suffering before all men’s eyes. And this 
Mount of Punishment is crowned, Vesuvius-like, 
with smoke and flame. A volcano? It lifts it- 
self as a fiery symbol in the dust-smothered 
heavens and from its open mouth floats up an 
enormous burning point of interrogation. It sug- 
gests a thousand similes. It glows and smolders 
like a sickle, or a scimitar, a curved Damoclean 
sword demanding answers to innumerable enig- 
mas—a flaming glaive held before the portals of 
that future Paradise whose augury to man is 
Peace and Contentment. But the planet is sick, 
254 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 255 


sick with man, and no panacea has yet been 
found. Nevertheless, search is being made. 
Among these forces which are striving to estab- 
lish a new Order in a new Cosmos, Count Her- 
mann Keyserling and his School of Wisdom at 
Darmstadt must be accounted as one of the most 
potent and important. In the course of a few 
years this dynamic personality, this Philosopher 
of the Present, a kind of blond and middle-aged 
Faust out of the Baltic borderlands, has succeeded 
in establishing a modern and secular Glastonbury 
in which, himself administering as High Priest, he 
uplifts the Grail of a new human dispensation. 
A firm and luminous nucleus has been established 
in the pretty Hessian capital, there is a novitiate 
of faithful pupils and disciples and a loyal fol- 
lowing among well-known modern intellectuals in 
Germany and the adjoining lands, a monument 
of solid and constructive philosophical works and 
inspirational pamphlets—such are a few of the 
achievements of this remarkable man of thought 
and action. At the recent session of the School 
for Free Philosophy at Darmstadt, members 
came from all parts of Germany and from foreign 
lands, and they came with something of the spirit 
of devotion characterizing pilgrims. Brooding 
over the whole we find, as in an afterglow of the 


256 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


_ Augustan or Weimarian tradition, the patronage, 
practical assistance and close personal interest of 
Ernst Ludwig, the former Grand Duke of Hessen. 

What is this new Cosmos toward which Key- 
serling strives? What vital message or new syn- 
thesis does he bring us? What spiritual achieve- 
ments are there to justify this apparently pre- 
sumptuous and almost self-contradictory title— 
“The School of Wisdom?’ Does this Philoso- 
pher also presume to be a Prophet? A Savior? 
Out of what balsams or poisons are his panaceas 
made? ‘The pontifical authority which he has 
usurped and which he exercises within the con- 
fines of his school—this czardom of the spirit 
that would eliminate all dispute and debate— 
upon what altruistic or egocentric urges is it 
based? 

Mixed with the choruses of admiration, the 
strivings of emulation, there are sharp and cyni- 
cal voices raised against the man who has made, 
as they aver, a cult of self-aggrandisement and 
self-deification out of his philosophy. It is also 
quite in keeping with the spirit of German par- 
ticularism and German intellectual strife that a 
keen and acrid antagonism should have broken 
out between Count Keyserling and Dr. Rudolf 
Steiner, the active founder and prophet of the 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 257 


Triune State, which has its lay temples, its pa- 
trons, followers, schools and official organs. 

In “What We Need!—What I am Striving 
For,” one of his small, characteristically black 
and yellow pamphlets, all of which bear, typo- 
graphically, a tasteful and individualistic stamp, 
Count Keyserling has laid down his fundamental 
principles, ideals and plan of action. Keyser- 
ling believes that our occidental culture can be 
preserved from that fate which Oswald Spengler 
has prophesied for it in such sombre and apoca- 
lyptic colors, only by the ascendancy of wisdom 
over knowledge. This truth is not, to be sure, 
a new discovery, but it is a truth which in an age 
like ours must be constantly rediscovered and re- 
affirmed. 

In “The Way to Perfection,” Keyserling de- 
manded a centre for this new mission and out- 
lined a definite plan. ‘This at once brought forth 
a response. The “Society for Free Philosophy” 
was founded, and founded upon a practical basis. 
The Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hessen made 
liberal donations and provided quarters for the 
Society and the School. Within the compass of 
these and through the medium of his various 
books, Keyserling has developed an intensive 
form of exhortation and instruction, striving 


258 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


steadily toward the realization of the goal of his 
life: the reconciliation between intellect and 
soul, the remarriage between them, the metabo- 
lism between the content and the form of life, 
the education and systematic training to a life 
conditioned by apperception in its higher and 
highest forms. 

This School of Wisdom has no fast and firm 
curriculum, for it is based upon the ideal of “Be- 
ing,” rather than upon the ideal of “Being able 
to do.” Personality transcends ability—ap- 
proaching in this the Goethean postulate that the 
supreme felicity of man is personality. “Full 
value human beings (Vollmenschen) are to be 
fashioned out of fragmentary modernities, men 
capable of leadership out of the undecided of 
will, the wise or sage-like man out of those 
crammed with theoretical knowledge.” The 
program sounds audacious and utopian. 

“The eternal basic accord in every man’s heart 
is to be struck into any melody that may be de- 
sired—nothing is to be taken from him, but only 
added unto him.”’ Each man is to be furthered 
in accordance with his own intrinsic nature, each 
is to find the path unto himself, to the formation 
of the personal Self. 

Keyserling recognizes the fact that such an 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 259 


intensive cultivation of the human spirit and per- 
sonality can be attained only by personal influ- 
ence—as within the walls or porches of Plato’s 
Academy, or the Oriental schools of wisdom 
where living contact means so much. This 
method is to be followed in this modern school 
—the educational objective is: “the polarization 
of personalities.” A certain cloistral seclusion is 
therefore necessary, though once a year there is 
a Congress of all those interested in the School 
and the Society. These comprise the Commun- 
alty of the Patrons, the Communalty of the 
Scholars, the Communalty of the Intellectually 
Related. The official organ of the Society and 
School is called ‘Der Leuchter’ (“The Candel- 
abrum’’) and this, varied in many interesting 
forms by different artists, is also the symbol of 
the publishing house of Otto Reichl, which is- 
sues Keyserling’s books and those of his fol- 
lowers. In addition there are personal com- 
munications of the Count’s and pertinent articles 
by the leaders of the school published from time 
to time under the title “Der Weg zur Vollen- 
dung.” 

During the recent sojourn of Rabindranath 
Tagore in Germany and the astonishing furore 
he created with the most unteutonic thinness of 


260 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


his thought, a kind of spiritual affiliation was es- 
tablished with this emissary of the spirit of 
the East, and a regular exchange of philosophical 
values arranged. But the diluted and trans- 
parent generalizations upon the themes of Love, 
Humanity and Eternity which characterize the 
Indian poet and teacher, stand in sharp contrast 
with the bulk of Keyserling’s thought which is 
pregnant with earth-experience, fresh summaries 
and new ideas. Keyserling’s efforts are directed 
against the sabotage of the spiritual-intellectual 
treasury which mankind has slowly erected in its 
own honor, and against all attempts to prevent 
its being extended laterally and vertically. In 
his “What We Need!—What I am Striving 
For,” he writes: 


“Until this truth once more become dominant: that 
something else than intellect and the fabrics of intellect 
condition the forms of life—that it is the fixed character 
of the soul which decrees and determines these—we need 
hope for no improvement in our condition. The terri- 
ble fallacy of this Age—to compress it into a single 
phrase—was this: that that Freedom which intellect 
rightly demands, that Freedom which was one of the 
fairest achievements of the dying 18th century, should 
have been added as a mere veneer to the spiritual life 
of our day. The error lay in not recognizing that the 
essential freedom of man, if it is to be expressed in the 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 261 


spiritual medium at all, calls for conditions which are 
quite different—that only the organized and not the 
amorphous soul can be free.” 


“A new synthesis of intellect and spirit has become 
necessary. A synthesis which is directed toward estab- 
lishing a new balance of the various parts of man, not 
with the backward, but with the most highly-developed 
elements.” 


Interesting is Keyserling’s analysis of the state 
of the modern German soul and his reason for 
his belief that the new synthesis will be first dis- 
covered in Germany. The German suffers 
from the “irreality” of his spirit. Thought in 
application to Life is remote to him—and no 
man more than he exemplifies the Schopenhau- 
erian dictum that the “Intellect is the parasite 
of the Will.” He finds it difficult to relate 
Thinking and Being—and loses himself, now in 
impracticability, now in ideologies, now in crass 
materialism—always the victim of his slow, un- 
differentiated soul. But it is precisely this spir- 
itual need and its recognition which causes the 
cry for the new synthesis to resound loudest of 
all in Germany. Nowhere else is the insuffi- 
ciency, the imperfection of the present mentality 
of mankind more clearly, more poignantly recog- 
nized than here. The German thought of lib- 


262 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


eration, the German Goftessuchen or search for 
God, the newer, unscholastic German philos- 
ophy and the German Jugendbewegung, or 
Movement of Youth, are in this sense but one 
single cry of longing. And since all things great 
are born of longing—for only he that seeks shall 
find, and only he that hath not shall achieve, and 
only he who is not already at the goal is con- 
scious of the problems that encumber the path 
toward it—it follows that Germany with this 
great objective in view and the distance that sep- 
arates her from it ever before her eyes, is to be 
regarded as the soil upon which the New Synthe- 
sis will most likely spring to birth. 

It is Philosophy and not Religion which Key- 
setling declares must solve and heal our modern 
ills and problems. But not Philosophy in the 
sense of a dry science or intellectual sport—its 
real essence lies in the fulfillment of Science in 
the synthesis of Wisdom. 

It is remarkable, declares the Philosopher of 
Darmstadt, that it is precisely Socrates, con- 
demned by the Athenians as a corrupter of 
youth, who has been elevated to the rank of a 
prototype of all occidental philosophy—with the 
result that the concept of the Sage—that is, the 
One Who Knows, in contradistinction to the 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 263 


Truth Seeker—never obtained a foothold in Eu- 
rope, as was the case in India. Wisdom, in 
short, has never been the conscious goal of Euro- 
pean effort. The evolutionary goal of the phi- 
losopher lies in his ascent to the plane of the Sage. 
And Philosophy must be life in the form of 
Knowledge. A new type of Man must be postu- 
lated, the highest expression of which is the Wise 
Man and not the Learned Man, and this ideal 
must be concentrated and focused in institutions 
which are based upon the culture of Being and 
not, as already set forth, of merely “Being able 
to do.” 

In response to an invitation to attend the re- 
cent annual session of the “School of Wisdom,”’ 
I betook myself to Darmstadt. ‘The session was 
inaugurated with a social evening during which 
the visitors were met and greeted by Count Key- 
serling, the Grand Duke of Hessen, Count 
Hardenberg, and a number of intellectuals. 
The assemblage was the usual gathering of Ger- 
man types of the middle and upper intellectual 
classes, rather drab and showing the wear and 
tear of the war in subdued wardrobes. Here 
and there were poetic-scholarly, even a few the- 
atrical faces, types of the intensive thinker, one 
or two Whitmanian Naturmenschen with long 


264 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


_ locks, open Byronic (Schiller) collars, teachers, 
literary men and women, a sprinkling of aristo- 
crats, mostly in street garb—a few in evening 
dress. The faces were, on the whole, undistin- 
guished and bourgeois, though revealing great 
capacity and efficiency. This point is worthy of 
mention, because Count Keyserling lays a proper 
weight upon externals and upon cosmopolitan 
dress and manners and does not underrate the 
psychological effects of polished forms of inter- 
course. 

This super-Chautauqua took place in an old- 
fashioned dance and concert hall decorated with 
palms and flowers. The lecture rostrum was set 
in a high leafy bower against a huge arched win- 
dow through which streamed a flood of blinding 
light into the eyes of the audience, leaving the 
speaker outlined with nebulous face against this 
glare. This showed a certain lack of adroit stage 
management and ceremonial. ‘This intrusion of 
harsh daylight into the inner world of thought ~ 
and harmony was, however, soon subdued by the 
erection of a great screen through which a glow 
of mellow light was shed over the interior. The 
addresses and lectures took place at ten in the 
morning and at four in the afternoon. 

Count Keyserling himself, a tall man, with an 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 265 


open, genial face, thin fair-gray hair irradiating 
his finely modeled head, and a moustache and 
goatee giving emphasis to his face, opened the 
session with a lecture upon “Tension and 
Rhythm.” The Universe was a complex of 
these forces and movements, and all nature was 
progressing toward a balanced and equalized har- 
mony. This law of rhythm and tension, trans- 
lated into religious, ethical and intellectual terms 
such as the Orient, the Occident, the Catholic 
Church, Bolshevism, and the like, brought forth 
the phenomena of civilization, the present antag- 
onism between East and West, between Capital 
and Labor, between Democracy and Autocracy. 
Every eccentric movement was the beginning of 
a new concentric movement. The ideal of life 
was not to be sought in the abolition of antag- 
onisms. Love thy enemy, but as an enemy. 
This founder and leader of the “School of 
Wisdom” won his first crown of fame through his 
remarkable book, ‘““The Travel Diary of a Phi- 
losopher” (Das Reétsetagebuch eines Philoso- 
phen). It appeared shortly after the war and its 
effect upon intellectual and literary Germany 
and upon many of the neighboring countries 
which are galvanized by the major intellectual 
forces of Germany, was tremendous. It was 


266 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


_ hailed as a kind of new revelation, a lay Bible for 
the reorientation of the modern spirit, a work 
packed with intensive potentialities of construc- 
tive, subversive, reformative thought. Leaving 
his family seat of Raykill in Esthonia, Keyserl- 
ing, anxious to shake off the rust of the recluse, 
went on a voyage around the world. He wished 
to let its great pageant play upon his mind and 
soul once more. The result was this remarkable 
work in two volumes, a work unique, full of con- 
clusive yet searching thought, of perfected form 
and self-questioning, of love of beauty and of 
freedom from the gravitation and duskiness of the 
schoolbound philosopher. In this book the world, 
revolving about a dominant personality along an 
equatorial travel-line which intersected Africa, 
Asia, Japan, the South Sea Islands and North 
America from West to East, is held up as a spin- 
ning crystal. Through this all life and history 
pass as in a vivid procession to the music of a 
clear and exact yet delicate commentary of criti- 
cal thought. And then, this modern, perambu- 
lant Montaigne, subtle, many-sided, universal, re- 
turns to his country seat, in the firm conviction 
that the way around the world was after all, the 
shortest way to himself. The “Travel Diary” 
is a world in itself, or rather three—the material, 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 267 


the intellectual, the metaphysical. It pulsates 
with living thought, with lghtning-like and in- 
tuitive seizures of truth. A deep yet serene mu- 
sic goes through it and it has much of the inevi- 
tability of form and content of an inspired work 
of art. 

Keyserling’s other books, so far as their influ- 
ence goes, revolve as planets about this central 
sun of his transfigured “Diary.” ‘The Frame- 
work of the World” is a youthful but brilliant 
attempt to set up a new system of critical phi- 
losophy—an abstract world realized with an ar- 
tistic, at times almost dramatic, power. In 
“Immortality,’’ another work of his, Keyserling, 
in his capacity as a naturalist, illuminates the un- 
fathomable problem of life and death critically 
from the viewpoint of the relation between 
natural phenomena and the world of human im- 
agining. It is Continuity which, as in a wave 
and its progress, gives life and men immortality, 
but “all Philosophy ends with Resignation before 
the gates of the Inscrutable, and in Awe before 
the Mystery.” 

In his book, ‘‘Philosophy as Art,” Keyserling 
sets up the thesis that Philosophy is not a Science, 
but an Art, and gives us an insight into the deep- 
est fundaments of his thought and his work, the 


268 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


realization of self, and the gradual ascent to a 
clarified apperception. It is a splendid spiritual 
gesture, a bold act meant to recover for philoso- 
phy its ancient meaning and authority—the liv- 
ing love of Wisdom. Another work which many 
hold to be Count Keyserling’s most important 
and significant, is “A Prologomena to Natural 
Philosophy.” It proceeds from Kantian postu- 
lates, and strives to develop and extend these in 
accordance with the fruits of modern research. 
‘The Kantian world, according to Keyserling, had 
been made arid by the professional Kantians who 
preached and interpreted the letter and not the 
spirit of the Sage. The “Prologomena” is a 
book which, in spite of its philosophical termi- 
nology and sheer reasoning, is full of great and 
harmonious rhythms of creative thought. Here 
we have inspired metaphysics and not labored 
critical science applied to the stating, the analysis 
and the comprehension of the riddles of life. 
Keyserling’s latest work was published in the 
autumn of 1922 and is entitled “Creative Knowl- 
edge” (Schépferische LErkenntnis). It is a 
“wedge-shaped,”’ rhythmical work which, while 
reiterating many of the earlier thoughts and 
ideals of the philosopher, is directed toward ex- 
tending their empire and significance as embodied 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 269 


in the “School of Wisdom,” and in the personal 
influence of its founder and leader. Keyserling 
has become aware of his growing power, of the 
penetration of his thought into the fabric of the 
times, of his fecundation of many minds that 
have in turn become fruitful, of his increasing 
army of loyal followers and disciples, of the ex- 
tension of the frontiers of his spiritual realm. 
His language, especially in his ‘‘Foreword,” takes 
on a tone of calm and conscious authority; it is 
the tone and attitude of the Sage, Prophet and 
Master—the philosopher has become aware of his 
place, and the pontifical comes of itself. In this 
“Foreword” he writes: 


“It is not my intention to erect in this book a com- 
plete and insulated structure of theoretical teaching, but 
to give forth living impulses. I do not wish to present 
my readers with a picture of this or that, but to trans- 
form them. And I wish to transform them into human 
beings who contemplate the world independently from a 
higher outlook and who live on a higher plane than here- 
tofore. But this is conditioned by the fact as to whether 
my word has become flesh to them, or not. The whole 
peculiar rhythm of ‘Creative Knowledge’ is directed 
toward the inauguration of this process.” 


Running through the fabric of the Keyserling- 
ian philosophy we find again and again echoes 


270 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


and approaches which reveal a certain affinity 
with the more subtle aspects and depths of Amer- 
ican Pragmatism and New Thought, though in 
his chapters upon America (in the “Diary’”), he 
utters severe Judgments upon the materialism of 
this country, and its pseudo-religious phenomena. 
Within the shadowy cathedral aisles of the Big 
Trees in the Mariposa Grove in California, he is 
full of hushed reverence and the future of Amer- 
ica appears to him in a great vision upon the 
background of the primitive Golden Past, trans- 
ported here into the present. 

Keyserling’s personal teaching of his pupils 
and disciples is based upon a kind of exercitium 
in the manner of the Jesuits, upon seclusion, 
meditation, going-into-oneself. Always, he de- 
clared to me, his scholars came to him with the 
question: ‘“What should one do?” And to all 
of them he restated the question in this form: 
“What should J do?” For the concept “one” is 
always the secondary result of the sum of indi- 
viduals and of individual decisions, and so ‘“‘one” 
can become profitable only through the fact that 
the majority of the personalities in question have 
chosen that path which in every instance and 
upon all occasions happened to be that which best 
suited their peculiarities. There is no primary 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 271 


“one.” Those who judge and act from the view- 
point of “one,” deliver themselves up to precon- 
ceived abstractions and thereby lose contact with 
their creative selves. 

Thus, in spite of the affiliations of “The 
School of Wisdom” with the Eastern philoso- 
phies, we find an intensification of the personal 
Ego, an occidental apotheosis of the individual 
instead of the oriental submergence in the All. 
It is not even submergence in his school or its 
precepts which Keyserling demands or preaches, 
but simply voluntary subjection to the master or 
guiding mind until the personal world has devel- 
oped itself in strength and fullness. “Creative 
Knowledge” is not only the latest, but also the 
most provocative and inspired book which 
Count Keyserling has written—it is packed with 
pith and stimulus, and even the textual titles at 
the top of every page are like the concentrated 
and long-studied names of books. We are con- 
fronted by a clear profundity and astuteness to 
which we must undoubtedly give the name of 
wisdom, both inborn and acquired and reinforced 
by experience. There is also an intuitive laying- 
bare of the secret springs of human and national 
action which gives Keyserling the additional dig- 
nity of a clairvoyant political personality. His 


272 NEW VISION IN THE GERMAN ARTS 


political capacities have, moreover, been made 
clear through a number of brilliant pamphlets 
upon politics, government and economics which 
he has published. 

What is Count Keyserling’s goal and that of 
his school? It may, perhaps be best expressed 
in the concluding words of his latest and most 
dynamic book. Under the heading “The New 
Basic Tone of Life,” he writes: 


“That which may and should come to pass to-day 1s 
not reéstablishment of religion upon its original plane, 
but the elevation, the enthronement of all forms of life 
upon that plane formerly occupied by religion. Here 
indeed is the goal. Philosophy, politics, practical action 
must henceforth be given the same deep background 
hitherto possessed only by Religion. 

“So far, so good. Yet there are those who might ob- 
ject: ‘You direct us earthward. You yourself have 
said that the Empire of the Wise is utterly of this 
world. How can we then reconcile this with the ulti- 
mate yearning of the Soul? Let me answer this with 
a few concluding words which embody my personal con- 
fession of faith. I shall be brief because all discursive- 
ness concerning ultimate things tends to violate their 
essentials. Again and again have I pointed out that 
‘Heaven’ can only be realized in that it realizes itself 
on earth. Its realization in our midst signifies at once 
its own spiritual dimension and destiny. 


THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SPIRIT 273 


“But there is a still more pertinent reason why the 
way which I point out to men leads toward the Earth 
and not toward Heaven: it is necessary that the tasks of 
this Earth be fulfilled and fulfilled completely, because 
here alone 1s freedom to be found. In all that lies “Be- 
yond,’ freedom and destiny lapse into one, and the con- 
cept of Freedom becomes meaningless. In consequence 
there is no longer any possibility of any voluntary 
higher development there. There we merely see the ef- 
fects of beginnings made here. Hence there is truth in 
the Indian teaching that the gods must be born as men 
in order to grow beyond their godhead. Hence Chris- 
tianity and Islam are no doubt right in affirming that 
this life finally decides. He who fulfills the temporal 
task and fulfills it completely—he alone extends his in- 
fluence through time—to Eternity.” 


Count Keyserling may be but a prophet un- 
tested by time, may be but one of many prophets 
crying forth messages new and old, in the sorry 
wilderness of the Age. But he is not a mere ped- 
dler or virtuoso in philosophy, but one who is 
attempting to bu/d in the wilderness. In this, 
too, and not only in the validity of his ideas and 
the vitality of his philosophy, lies the great sig- 
nificance of this spiritual enterprise in an un- 
spiritual age. Here in this open, deliberate and 
organized avowal that the meditation of the soul, 
the purest and freest flights of the human mind, 


274 THE ARTS IN THE NEW GERMANY 


shall still be dominant forces and factors in the 
life of modern man, there is something almost 
sublime. This something will determine its own 
form, and this form its own force, time and 
fecundity. 








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